Feed Items
The U.S. Education Department is set to resume garnishing wages from student loan borrowers in default.
The practice, put on hold during the pandemic, will resume early next year, according to multiple news accounts Tuesday (Dec. 23).
“We expect the first notices to be sent to approximately 1,000 defaulted borrowers the week of Jan. 7,” a department spokesperson told NPR, adding that...
Consumers continue to spend more on their debit cards, although the rate of growth has slowed.
Total debit card transaction volume and value both grew at an average rate of 4.6% per year from 2021 to 2023, the Federal Reserve Board said in its latest report on debit card transactions, which is released every other year.
The figures showed a deceleration compared to the 12-year period...
Ex-FTX executive Brett Harrison raised $35 million for his perpetual futures exchange startup, The Information reported Tuesday (Dec. 23).
The new funding round values Architect Financial Technologies at $187 million, according to the report, which cited unnamed sources.
The exchange, AX, offers perpetual futures on assets like stocks and foreign currencies, the report said. Perpetual...
Expedia, Yelp, Angi, and Square are building agentic artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for Amazon’s Alexa+.
The new integrations are set to debut on the virtual assistant device next year, Amazon wrote on its blog Tuesday (Dec. 23).
“We understand that a truly useful personal assistant needs to connect with services that customers rely on every day,” said Daniel Rausch, vice...
The reporter who uncovered fraud at blood-testing startup Theranos is reportedly among a group of six writers who sued six artificial intelligence (AI) companies on Monday (Dec. 22), alleging that they trained their AI systems on copyrighted works without permission.
John Carreyrou, who is now with The New York Times, and five other writers sued Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta...
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says rental scams have cost consumers $65 million since 2020.
That’s according to a new analysis from the FTC released Tuesday (Dec. 23), showing that consumers have reported almost 65,000 of these scams—many of which began with fake listings on Facebook and Craigslist—in the last five years.
The scams typically involve phony rental listings, which...
Silicon Valley-focused banking startup Erebor Bank is expected to raise $350 million, Bloomberg reported Tuesday (Dec. 23).
The funding round would value Erebor at $4.35 billion, according to the report, which cited unnamed sources.
Backed by billionaire Peter Thiel and named for the dragon-guarded mountain of treasure in “The Hobbit,” Erebor Bank has positioned itself as a potential...
Two new sets of data show consumers are spending strongly but not feeling confident.
U.S. gross domestic product climbed at a seasonal and inflation-adjusted 4.3% annual rate in the quarter running from July through September, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday (Dec. 23). The report had been delayed by the government shutdown.
“The increase in real GDP in...
ServiceNow plans to acquire Armis for $7.75 billion in cash and create a unified, end-to-end security exposure and operations stack.
The stack will cover all connected devices and help protect the expanded attack surface created by the adoption of artificial intelligence, according to a Tuesday (Dec. 23) press release. The planned acquisition will add Armis’ cyber risk management...
American consumers spent more this holiday season while using cross-channel shopping and artificial intelligence (AI) tools for bargain hunting and convenience, according to separate analyses by Mastercard and Visa.
Mastercard SpendingPulse found that U.S. retail sales excluding automotive increased 3.9% year over year from Nov. 1 through Dec. 21, according to a Tuesday (Dec. 23) press...