T Stamp Inc (NASDAQ:IDAI, EURONEXT:AIID), doing business as Trust Stamp, President Andrew Gowasack talked with Proactive about a newly announced partnership with Neural Payments focused on addressing rising fraud in the peer-to-peer (P2P) payments space.
Proactive: All right, welcome back inside our Proactive newsroom. And joining me now is Andrew Gowasack, he is the president of Trust Stamp. And Andrew, it's great to see you again. How are you?
Andrew Gowasack: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me back.
Yeah. Good to have you along. And the company out with some news today that you've got another partnership with a company called Neural Payments. So, this sounds to me like it's a pretty significant agreement that you've signed here, Andrew.
Yeah. So, you know, with the proliferation of popular person-to-person or peer-to-peer apps like PayPal, Venmo, Cash App and Zelle, just to name a few. You know, the global P2P payment market size is projected to hit about 3.63 trillion by this year and reach about 16.21 trillion by 2034, growing at a compound annual growth rate of about 18.1% from 2025 to 2034.
But fraudsters have taken notice and are using a combination of generative AI as well as social engineering to intercept payments or even trick users into voluntarily sending them money. In fact, about 8% of all banking customers say they've been victimized by P2P scams in the last 12 months. That's one of the reasons you might feel like you're constantly getting reminders from your bank to not share your password or your one-time passcode with anybody, even if they say they're from the bank.
So, community banks increasingly want to offer P2P payment services to compete with larger financial institutions and fintech companies like we've talked about. But the fraud levels are really daunting.
Okay. So within that sort of P2P payment sector, talk to me a bit about the community banks and sort of the impact that they're making.
Yeah. So community banks can really have a massive impact here. So there are nearly 4,500 community banks in the United States, and not many people know, community banks represent about 90% of all banks operating in this country. So, the Independent Community Bankers of America or ICBA exclusively represents them through advocacy, education, and innovation. And Trust Stamp and Neural Payments are ICBA ThinkTECH accelerator graduates.
And so by addressing this significant pain point, P2P payments will be more viable for ICBA's numerous member banks.
Okay. So, there are thousands of community banks that I'm sure would want to provide these types of services. So how does your partnership sort of zero in and help this move forward?
Sure. So it all starts with our low-code orchestration platform. Neural Payments is using it to provide robust know-your-customer, or KYC, to banks by enabling a customer to enroll using their face as well as a government-issued photo ID, which is converted into our irreversibly transformed identity token or IT2, for future comparison.
Now, when a customer wants to, let's say, approve a payment, they just take another selfie. That generates a new IT2, and it's automatically compared to the enrollment IT2. From the consumer's perspective, that's super easy—as easy as taking a selfie. From a bank's perspective, it's much more secure than sending a one-time passcode through either text or email.
And it's much less expensive and less time-consuming than trying to call the person to confirm that the customer actually initiated that payment.
Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and style