Carter Pape

Carter Pape has covered cybersecurity, financial crime and emerging technology for American Banker since January 2022.

Pape, reporting from Sacramento, California, connects technical complexities to their practical consequences. He examines how cybercriminals target and infiltrate banks and how the technologies reshaping the world (such as AI and quantum computing) create new risks for banks and their customers.

Pape’s work has earned recognition at the regional and national levels, having earned him an award and award finalist recognitions from the American Society of Business Publication Editors and SIIA.

Highlights of Pape’s work include:

• No longer optional: Cyber risk oversight for boards, which examined the expanding liability exposure facing bank directors as regulators raise expectations for cyber governance;
• Inside a sophisticated, foiled cyber-heist targeting ATMs, an account of a coordinated attack on bank cash infrastructure and the defenses that stopped it;
• The promise and perils of QR codes in banking, which explored how a ubiquitous consumer technology became a vector for financial fraud.
• How quantum computers work, and how banks can use them, which broke down the physics and engineering of quantum computation and assessed the realistic near- and long-term implications for the banking industry
• Main Street banks can avoid Wall Street’s WhatsApp fines. Here’s how. This article explained how community banks could navigate SEC enforcement around personal device usage for work communications.

Pape’s broader coverage at American Banker addresses data breaches, fraud prevention, regulatory compliance, artificial intelligence in financial services and the evolution of digital banking.

Before joining American Banker in January 2022, Pape spent three years as a reporter at The Times-Independent in Moab, Utah, where he was one of four full-time journalists covering a county of 10,000 people.

Pape reported on public lands, local government, housing and more. He also rebuilt the publication’s website from the ground up, earning the Utah Press Association’s Best Website award in 2019 for the redesign.

Pape’s reporting on Moab won recognition from the Utah Press Association for excellence in government and politics reporting (first place) as well as general news (second place) and education coverage (second place).

Pape holds a degree in mathematics from North Carolina State University. At NC State he became news editor of the student newspaper, Technician, to get a break from the analytical and technical work of mathematical proofs. The experience inspired him to pursue a career in journalism.

Alongside his seven years as a journalist, Pape brings more than a decade of programming experience, having interned as a software developer for companies including IBM. He continues to regularly tinker with Python, Docker and shell scripting in his free time.