2026 Innovators Under 35: She Audits Popular Apps to Stop Financial Abuse
MIT Technology Review selected Assistant Professor Rosanna Bellini for its 2026 Innovators Under 35 list, an annual list honoring early-career researchers and entrepreneurs for breakthrough work.
Bellini was among the first researchers to document how online banking and payment apps can enable financial abuse in intimate partner violence. In the first audit of its kind, she and her collaborators reviewed 30 consumer finance tools, including apps from JPMorganChase, TD Bank, PayPal, Cash App, and Venmo, and found features that let abusers surreptitiously access a partner's bank account without any technical expertise. After her team flagged a way to add a second biometric login to a Chase account without alerting the account holder, the company updated the app to notify users when that happens.
"We can actually really make a huge difference in the design of these systems," Bellini said, "and we can save quite a lot of trauma and harm in the process by just making these very small tweaks and changes."
