Two trends are converging. The first is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to detect signs of manipulation and impersonation in real time, across the bombardment of messages, notifications and tasks they deal with every day in their work and personal lives, especially now that so much of this happens on one mobile device. The second is that people are increasingly delegating tasks to AI tools and agents that act on their behalf.

A big part of our thesis at FALKIN is that people need “always on” support to help them identify what is safe and what is not. This needs to work across all the major channels: when visiting a website, clicking on a link, replying to an email or text, or picking up a phone call. People need help making sure they are dealing with a legitimate organisation and a legitimate individual.

But real-time protection raises an important question. To warn someone about a dangerous website, a safety tool needs to know which website they are visiting.

Why surveillance is not the answer

There is an argument that the most protective system is one that sees everything, monitoring every click, message and call and linking it all to the individual. In theory, that might catch the most threats.

In practice, we believe it fails, because people will not adopt it. No one wants to feel under surveillance, and people certainly do not want their bank tracking their activity online. A safety tool that feels intrusive will be declined, switched off or deleted, and a tool that people refuse to use protects no one. Collecting that much personal data also creates a significant risk of its own.

We believe the most effective protection is the protection people are comfortable keeping switched on.

Our approach to privacy

There are different levels of privacy in how safety tools can be built. A basic element is creating a safety system that can run anonymously, without requiring account information or financial information.

A more advanced, privacy-preserving approach is now possible on major mobile operating systems. People can opt in to specialist providers that assess the websites they visit in real time and in an encrypted way, purely to assess the digital safety risk. The outcome is that a dangerous site is blocked or the individual receives an alert, without FALKIN or the financial institution storing that activity or linking it to any individual.

For banks and credit unions, this means they can offer real-time protection to their customers and members without asking them to trade privacy for safety.

We believe this is the best way to deliver prevention tooling in real time, and it will become a critical capability as people continue to interact more online and give more and more AI tools the authority to act on their behalf.

At FALKIN, we are focused on innovating in this space: intercepting suspicious threats while creating a beautiful user experience and preserving privacy.

FALKIN builds scam prevention tools for financial institutions in the US, UK and EU. Its mission is to stop scams before money moves.