Capital One has patented an artificial intelligence system designed to track cryptocurrency market movements by analyzing information scattered across the internet. The bank wants the AI to pull from
Capital One has patented an artificial intelligence system designed to track cryptocurrency market movements by analyzing information scattered across the internet. The bank wants the AI to pull from social media posts, regulatory announcements, and corporate news to generate trading suggestions for users.
Capital One formally named the patent "System and method for analysing Credibility of Cryptocurrency-related information." The patent's core argument is straightforward: cryptocurrency markets move around the clock across dozens of platforms and channels. No person can monitor all of it.
The patent describes what the system would do: "An artificial intelligence engine configured to predict a cryptocurrency market trend based on the credibility of the cryptocurrency-related information; and a processor to generate and execute a personalised trading decision based on the predicted cryptocurrency market trend."
To operate, the AI would draw from eight separate data sources: a cryptocurrency market module, social media module, event module, cryptocurrency company module, user module, regulation module, fiat currency module, and traditional data module. The system would process all that information and produce customized trading recommendations for each user.
For this to work, Capital One would need to store detailed personal financial data on its servers. Doing this would require serious infrastructure. Users would have to trust the bank with sensitive information, and the bank would need to prove it could protect that data.
That trust suffered a major blow in July 2019. Capital One experienced a massive data breach that exposed the private information of more than 100 million customers in the United States and six million in Canada. Hackers accessed Social Security numbers, home addresses, and credit scores. CNN called it one of the largest data breaches ever.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the FBI responded by fining Capital One $80 million. The bank also had to overhaul its risk management and cybersecurity practices.
For a company proposing to collect and analyze personal data from customers to power a data-mining system, the 2019 breach creates a credibility problem. Convincing people to hand over extensive personal information is already difficult. It becomes far harder after a breach of that magnitude.
