Tag Archives: finance

American Firms No Longer Have to Report Beneficial Ownership

I promised Diana Wales that I was going to write about this, so I’d better get cracking.

Beneficial ownership

I’ve talked about beneficial ownership before and why it’s important. As I said while discussing the ownership of Hungarian firm FaceKom:

“De facto control without de jure control could very well be wielded by a powerful politician, or his son-in-law.”

And to make things juicier, FaceKom was acquired by another Hungarian firm (4iG Informatikai) with government links. Viktor Orbán has since left office, and I don’t know the current status of either firm.

Because of this, businesses throughout the world track beneficial ownership, and the U.S. Government is here to help.

U.S. firms no longer have to report

Well, it used to be.

“The U.S. Treasury Department announced on Tuesday (Aug. 11) that its Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is permanently removing U.S. companies and U.S. persons from beneficial ownership reporting under the Corporate Transparency Act and will delete previously reported information. Foreign reporting companies remain subject to narrower requirements involving foreign beneficial owners.”

In essence, the idea is that U.S. companies don’t have to engage in beneficial ownership reporting because all U.S. owned companies are good and would never break the law. It’s only those foreign companies that do evil beneficial ownership disguises.

But financial entities are still responsible

Of course, this doesn’t only benefit the U.S. companies who are relieved of the reporting requirement. It also benefits financial firms who don’t have to worry about the beneficial ownership of U.S. owned companies because…oh wait…financial firms still have to worry.

“But eliminating a government reporting requirement does not eliminate the financial system’s need to understand corporate ownership. Banks, broker-dealers and other covered financial institutions remain subject to customer due diligence obligations designed precisely to prevent criminals from hiding behind legal entities. They must identify and verify beneficial owners in specified circumstances, understand customer relationships, build risk profiles and monitor for suspicious activity.”

So since there’s no central source of beneficial ownership information, the financial institutions must rely on alternate sources. Multiple alternate sources.

And the U.S. firms, breathing a sigh of relief from eliminating a government reporting requirement, will now have to submit reports to a myriad of private entities, and maybe some state authorities also. And if Texas demands that you file a beneficial ownership report, don’t mess with Texas.

Welcome to the world of efficiency.

And one more thing: how do we know that these U.S. owned companies AREN’T under foreign control?

A word from our (U.S. owned) sponsor

If your firm must explain its know your business processes to your own clients, perhaps you can take advantage of Bredemarket’s marketing and writing services.

Bredemarket: Services, Process, and Pricing.

Beware, Amazon: Credit Has Been Extended Beyond Humans

If you are staunchly declaring that your company will NEVER do business with a bot, forget it. The bots have credit cards now.

Yes, the credit card industry, which (before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974) would not let women apply for credit cards in their own names, is now starting to extend credit to non human identities.

PYMNTS:

“Mercury this week gave artificial intelligence agents something companies routinely give new employees: a corporate card of their own. Extending that perk to an agent, not a person, is new. Agent cards treat the agent exactly like that new hire, with its own payment credential, its own spending limits and its own audit trail, separate from any human on the team.”

And Mercury isn’t the only company issuing such cards.

“Ramp is issuing scoped virtual cards through its Visa partnership that external AI agents can use within policy guardrails set by a company…”

Robocredit. Google Lyria. Public Domain.

For those who worry about misuse, humans can misuse corporate credit cards also. And if this means that more entities will buy from your company, and possibly buy more rapidly…why should you complain?

Well, unless you’re Amazon. But as of now, Amazon has failed in its attempt to ban Perplexity AI shopping agents, so it’s fighting a losing battle.

The Other Half of Kalshi and Polymarket Trades

Ads emphasize positive outcomes and gloss over negative ones.

You’ve seen the ads for prediction markets. And the ads for online gambling. Not that I’m saying that futures trading is gambling, mind you.

Google Gemini.

Now when you see the ads, the people making the predictions ALWAYS win. Because people HAVE won with Kalshi or Polymarket, and why not emphasize the positive?

But the discerning viewer knows that every “game” has winners and losers. And if the ads were real, half of them (give or take) would end like this.

Google Gemini.

But it could be worse: much worse. Because the Kalshis and Polymarkets of the world differ from other futures trading. Google Gemini:

“Unlike traditional futures where $100 acts as a down payment to control a massive contract, Kalshi and Polymarket are fully collateralized. When you place a trade, you are buying “shares” in an event (like “YES, the Fed will cut rates” or “NO, it won’t rain tomorrow”).”

So you invest $100 and may lose $100. In hog futures, you can lose a lot more.

When You Get the Cheaper Tokens

I don’t think I’ve discussed tokenization in the Bredemarket blog, but I’m sure you heard about it. Because when you’re rated on a metric, people rush to maximize the metric, with the result that one anonymous company spent a half billion dollars on generative AI tokens in a single month. Because spending tokens means you’re optimizing your company performance…right?

A chorus of CFOs said “wrong.”

But before these high-spending companies jettison AI altogether and turn to 1,000 low-cost workers instead, they may instead turn to low-cost algorithms.

“Companies are looking to better manage their use of AI after seeing the costs of the technology rise….

“This has created an opening for Chinese AI labs that are able to charge less than the U.S. companies due to their more efficient models and China’s lower energy costs….

“Chinese AI models now have greater token consumption than U.S. ones, which marks a change since the beginning of the year….”

“Five Yuan Play.” Google Lyria. Public Domain.

We’ve already seen the efficiency and cost advantages of Chinese algorithms such as DeepSeek. But we’ve also seen the security concerns, including those that put TikTok’s future in limbo until it was sold.

This isn’t going to end well.

Underwriting the Ghost: Synthetic Borrowers Disappear Without Paying

When a lender receives a loan application, it endeavors to ensure that the applicant will pay the lender back.

But even with the proper controls, a certain percentage of loans go unpaid.

Especially if the applicant looks really good on paper, but isn’t…and doesn’t even exist because it’s a synthetic identity.

PYMNTS describes the threat from deepfake borrowers:

“Across the lending industry, a new category of fraud is emerging that combines deepfake video, cloned voices, synthetic identity creation, fabricated employment histories and AI-generated financial behavior into a single engineered persona. These synthetic borrowers are not merely fake identities in the traditional sense. They are algorithmically optimized consumers designed to survive onboarding checks, satisfy underwriting models and disappear once loans are funded.”

Disappearing borrowers is not a good thing.

Know your customer.

“Underwriting the Ghost.” Synthetic man gets the loan, then he disappears. Google Gemini/Lyria. Public Domain.

“Accept Without Posting” Issue Resolved…Even Though I Appeared To Be Very Evil

Here’s the resolution to the “Accept Without Posting” issue that I discussed on Saturday.

You’ll recall that I initiated a Zelle transfer to my account at “the blue bank,” but the blue bank “placed this transfer on hold so they can conduct further review.”

With no word on what the blue bank was reviewing. And the “blue bank” representative whom I spoke with on Saturday didn’t know either.

  • I had already ruled out the simple explanations, such as either the sending Zelle account or the receiving Zelle account didn’t exist.
  • I figured that perhaps my use of Zelle was the issue. The day before I sent the “on hold” transaction, I had sent another transaction. I figured that two transactions in two days tripped up some odd alert of possible account draining.

Neither of these turned out to be the issue.

On Monday (just after I had rated the “blue bank” 5 out of 10 for its handling of the issue; coincidence, or no?) I received a call from someone at my local “blue bank” branch.

Turns out that the issue was the COMMENT that I attached to the Zelle transfer.

My comment referenced another individual. Without revealing this person’s personally identifiable information (PII), I will state that his first name begins with a K, his last name begins with a P, and he is a “Junior.” So because acronyms are wonderful, I referred to this person as “KP2” in the Zelle transfer field.

Which was an extremely evil thing to do, because that tripped up an anti-money laundering check.

“AML.” Google Lyria. Public Domain.

Basically, anti-money laundering checks verify that a person isn’t transferring money for a sanctioned person.

And I didn’t trip up just ANY anti-money laundering check.

This one was bad.

AML catches evil people.

Really bad.

AML catches evil people.

How bad?

  • Let’s look at ISO 3166 country codes. The alpha 2-digit country code for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) is…KP. KP-02 is the specific administrative code for South Pyongan Province (Pyeonganbuk-do).
  • And the Korean People’s Army includes a II Corps that is sometimes abbreviated as…KPA II Corps or KPA 2nd Corps.

Back to the call I received from my local “blue bank” branch. The representative didn’t go into all that, but just said that my comment about “KP2” looked like a reference to North Korea.

I burst out laughing.

I gave the “blue bank” representative the full name of K[REDACTED] P[REDACTED] Junior, explained that there were five “KP”s, and that I used numbers to tell them apart.

Ironically, both “KP2” and “KP4” are veterans. I wonder if they realize their initials associate them with this guy.

Kim Jong Un. By Mil.ru, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=177498377.

Anyway, my answer satisfied the banker, the hold was removed from the Zelle transfer, and I received the money within minutes.

And I know to be careful when using acronyms beginning with the letter “K” in financial transactions.