Lady Business: Moving fast and breaking things, finance vs. tech; Malice vs. stupidity

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the twenty-sixth issue, published April 26, 2018.
 

High-Tech Failures

 
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been dealing with some unpleasant aftershocks of an identity theft that happened two years ago: After targeting tax returns and credit cards, the thieves/bots/amorphous hacker collectives have started opening fake bank accounts in my name.
 
Which is, of course, deeply frustrating. It’s also become an interesting illustration of how banks versus tech companies handle customer data!

So far I’ve discovered fraudulent bank accounts at a regional community bank and an online-only startup. When I called the small, traditional bank to close the fake account, they’d already caught it and shut it down.

When I called the startup, well. They didn’t quite understand what I was calling about at first. Then they told me I couldn’t talk directly to their fraud department, and gave me an email for the department that didn’t work. But a week later, they’re still emailing me customer-satisfaction surveys!

It may sound like I’m arguing: “Banks are good, tech startups are bad.” Or the more nuanced, and damning: “Banks are competent with customer data; tech companies are negligent at best.” Which is an argument that’s easy to buy into in these post-Cambridge Analytica days.

Unfortunately:

Zelle, a service that allows bank customers to instantly send money to their acquaintances, is booming. Thousands of new users sign up every day. Some $75 billion zoomed through Zelle’s network last year.

…But the same features that make Zelle so useful for customers, its speed and ubiquity, have made it irresistible to thieves. Hackers and con artists have used the system to steal from victims — some of whom had never used Zelle or even heard of it until someone used it to clean out their bank accounts.

Yep, it turns out that banks can be just as bad as tech companies at safeguarding customer data!
 
Big banks created Zelle a few years ago when they saw tech services like Venmo and PayPal and Apple Cash starting to take off. Now almost 100 banks are using Zelle or implementing it – and some of them, according to the New York Times investigation, are reportedly seeing a 90 percent fraud rate on it.

It’s inevitable that traditional financial companies implement more modern tech, by buying startups or building in-house products like Zelle. In a lot of ways, it’s welcome; you shouldn’t have to write a check to pay a friend back for dinner, or wade through hundreds of pages of mortgage applications to buy a house, or show up in person to open a new bank account. (Well. My life this month would be better in that last circumstance.)

But it’s pretty depressing to see tech’s cavalier attitudes about protecting customer data infect big old regulated finance, instead of the other way around.
 

Fundraising While Female

“Don’t attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity.” That’s Alexis Tryon, the founder of Artsicle and a vice president at The Muse, talking about some of her experiences pitching investors on her startup.

It’s a good all-purpose reminder these days!  (Except for the case of my amorphous hacker collective. I’m definitely crying malice there.)

Alexis was one of the speakers on an excellent women-in-tech panel I had the privilege of moderating last night. I moderate a fair amount of these discussions, some better than others, and this one was a standout, thanks to the women speaking on it: Alexis, Luminary Labs’ Sara Holoubek and Shareablee’s Tania Yuki were amazingly funny, blunt and helpful about the realities of starting your own business versus working for someone else.

Lady Bits

--“'It really does feel good,'” Mr. Guo said, as Ms. Shen gently whacked his back with a massage clapper device.” Being female at Chinese tech companies sounds, incredibly, totally worse than it is for women in Silicon Valley!
 
--So I’ve been looking for good, smart critiques of The Perfect Nanny, the ripped-from-the-headlines French novel about a nanny who murders the two kids under her care. It’s been the subject of breathless praise, and it was certainly easily readable, but I found it just kind of … boring? I wanted a lot more time spent on the mother, and a lot less on the nanny’s break with reality; spending a lot of time inside someone’s head while she goes crazy is just not that interesting, narratively, to me.

--Lady Business will be off next week. See you on May 10!
 
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