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In March 2015, the Financial Conduct Authority published a report on “Making currency account switching easier” detailing “the effectiveness of the Current Account Switch Service (CASS) and evidence on the account number portability”. It said that: Consumer organisations, while appreciating the benefits that such a system would give consumers, were also cautious about ANP, arguing that the real barriers to switching do not lie in the infrastructure but in the choice and differentiation of the current accounts available. From Making current account switching easier - making-current-account-switching-easier.pdf This is a fair point (note that it also applies to the current account switching service) but I think it misses the advantages to other stakeholders, not of ANP but of Virtual Account Numbers (VANs),  xxx Well, as I mentioned to [the Economic Secretary to the Treasury] at techUK (I was the nutter at back who kept going on about “7-0” solutions, Angela) the best way to do t...

xxx law enforcement agencies (LEAs) could attempt to lower the value of drugs traded on the marketplaces by purchasing products and then leaving bad reviews. From Cops Could Undermine Dark Web Markets by Leaving Fake Reviews | Motherboard xxx

xxx Interbank co-operative Swift has confirmed that it has experienced a number of recent instances of hackers compromising network interface devices at client banks to send fraudulent payment messages over the global banking network. From Swift confirms multiple cases of fraudulent message traffic May as well use Bitcoin then.

xxx Maj Gen Gerstner, the deputy commander for operations and intelligence for the US-led operation against IS, said under 20 air strikes targeting the group’s stores of money had been conducted… While it was difficult to know precisely how much money had been destroyed in total, estimates put the figure at between $500m and $800m, he said. From Islamic State: Up to $800m of funds 'destroyed by strikes' - BBC News xxx

xxx The prize is huge. If you know where people have been, what sites they visit, what apps they download, and also their spending habits, you know a massive amount about them – much more than their bankers, the credit and debit card companies, and more than their mobile phone operators. From Facebook payment system will change banking forever, but it comes with its own price tag – your privacy | Voices | The Independent xxx

xxx The jury at Bristol Crown Court was told the scheme went unnoticed until after the buyers had left, despite the word Monopoly written in huge letters down the middle of the bills. The paper cash bears a slight resemblance Euro notes but the colour scheme is much lighter and the images on the bills are out of focus compared to the real deal. From Fake MONOPOLY money which Gianni Accamo 'used to scam dealers out of diamonds' | Daily Mail Online xxx

My good friend Wendy Goodman was kind enough to write about her experiences at Tomorrow’s Transactions this year (our 19th annual Forum!!) referring to it as Tomorrow's Transactions Forum, Dave Birch's quirky annual event where ideas about the future of money are smashed together like particles to see what happens. From net.wars: The blockchain menu xxx

Earlier in the week I blogged about mobile banking security , and I said that in design terms it is best to assume that the internet is in the hands of your enemies. In case you think I was exaggerating… The thieves also provided “free” wireless connections in public places to secretly mine users’ personal information. From Gone in minutes: Chinese cybertheft gangs mine smartphones for bank card data | South China Morning Post Personally, I always use an SSL VPN when connected by wifi (even at home!) but I doubt that most people would ever go to this trouble or take the time to configure a VPN and such like. Anyway, the point is that the internet isn’t secure. And actually SMS isn’t much better, which is why it shouldn’t really be used for securing anything as important as home banking. The report also described how gangs stole mobile security codes – which banks automatically send to card holders’ registered mobile phones to verify online transactions – by using either a Trojan...

xxx Why should anyone have more trust in a digital currency created by an anonymous group of coders accountable to no-one than in a democratically-elected government accountable to everyone? Why is an essentially feudal governance model “safer” than a democratic one? From Bitcoin: In Technology We Trust (Maybe) - Forbes xxx

xxx Innovative banks are increasingly seeing their future as the stewards of identity From How Blockchain Fits into the Future of Digital Identity | American Banker xxx xxx

xxx Governments and regulators should avoid undue restrictions, support a predictable, consistent and simple legal environment and respect the “bottom-up” nature of the technology and its development in a global marketplace. “Do no harm” is the right approach for DLT. From Comment: With blockchain, regulators should first do no harm - FT.com xxx

xxx The head of the Chilean branch of Transparency International, which campaigns against corporate secrecy, resigned after being linked to five firms in tax havens. From A torrential leak | The Economist xxx

xxx In general, there were two fundamental challenges that needed to be addressed before smart contracts could be used in the real world. First: How would a smart contract actually control real assets so that it could enforce an agreement?… Second: What computer would be trusted to “execute" those terms in a way that both parties could rely upon? From How Close Are Smart Contracts to Impacting Real-World Law? - CoinDesk The emergence of the blockchain as the existence proof of a consensus protocol capable of operating an entirely trestles environment opened up new possibilities for dealing with the second problem, but the first one remains difficult to address. As Gideon Greenspan, who I take very seriously on such matters, has pointed out, the link between the world of the blockchain and the "real" world must be managed by a trusted entity , otherwise the blockchain cannot know that the state of the real world has changed.

xxx Micro investment company Acorns has accused ANZ Banking Group and other banks of telling customers they can't share account passwords with the start-up, retarding its growth.  From Banks and fintechs at war over password sharing | afr.com The article calls password-sharing a “grey area”, which it really isn’t, since both bank procedures and common sense security practice should tell us that giving _anyone_ a password (which ought not to be thought of as any form of security at all) to a third party is dangerous. When they get hacked, you get hacked.

xxx Егор Цветков (Egor Tsvetkov), a photographer in Russia, has taken photos of random people on the subway and connected them to social media portraits and complete profiles using face matching technology. From Subway photographer connects random photos to people's social media profiles | Privacy Online News Right now, he’s using some software that matches faces against the pictures on vKontakte, the Russian version of Facebook, and it is getting a 70% match rate even against photographs taken from angles and under different lighting. Think what this means. When I walk into a conference, my Google glasses will be able to tell me who everyone is and scan their LinkedIn profiles. I’ll get it to put green ticks next to people who influence the budgets at banks and red crosses next to mouthy but powerless middle managers such as myself. Come on, you’d all do it. It’s embarrassing enough meeting people that you’ve forgotten meeting, or remembered their names wrong or you didn’t ...

xxx One of the concerns about Ethereum contract safety has always been the issue that even though it's theoretically possible to check a piece of code and make sure that it does exactly what you expect it to do, in practice, outside of highly standardized contexts (ie. widely used dapps) where many people can audit the code, it's hard for the average user to check and make sure that there is no secret bug in the program... I actually found a real live example of this on the ethereum mainnet today. From Live example of "underhanded solidity" coding on mainnet : ethereum I hadn't much thought about this, although I imagine my colleagues who spend more time thinking about risk analysis had, and I once again reinforced to me the distinction between shared ledger applications (SLAPPs) and actual contracts! Would you want to use a system where,

Over at the Ron Paul Liberty Report they are in doubt as to who is behind this sort of thing. The War on Cash is a favorite pet project of the economic central planners. They want to eliminate hand-to-hand currency so that governments can document, control, and tax everything. From The World’s First Cashless Society Is Here - A Totalitarian’s Dream Come True - Ron Paul Liberty Report xxx

xxx "The total addressable market of people who want to buy bitcoin is very, very thin," From What a Tech Startup's Pivots Say About Bitcoin's Future | American Banker Indeed. And most of them aren’t in America or any other developed market.

xxx The use of cash has fallen more than 50% in the last four years and is projected to continue to fall as consumers look for faster and secure means of paying options. With a high degree of smartphone penetration in the US market, mobile and digital payments are rapidly gaining a market share in digital payments. From Americans Are Using Less Cash but Mobile Payments Are Not The Ones Replacing It | Let's Talk Payments xxx

xxx “It is important for countries like Korea which suffer a severe polarization of wealth due to the shadow economy to pursue more transparency,” From [Weekender] Korea going coinless by 2020 xxx

Before the industrial revolution, we lived in an essentially cashless economy. A reputation economy. There was very little money in circulation.   xxx To spur the trend, the Bank of Korea is seeking a digital way to replace coins for transactions with its aim to make Korea a “coinless society” by 2020. From [Weekender] Korea going coinless by 2020 xxx Meanwhile, Kenneth Rogoff in his book on cash makes precisely the opposite recommendation: that we replace the banknotes with digital alternatives and keep the coins.

Sarah Jeong, writing in The Atlantic, raises the spectre of of surveillance in a cashless society. And she's right. When money becomes information, it can inform on you. From How a Cashless Society Could Embolden Big Brother - The Atlantic xxx In June 2015, Thomas Dart, the sheriff of Cook County—the largest county in Illinois, which includes the city of Chicago—wrote an open letter to the major payment processors. “As the Sheriff of Cook County, a father and a caring citizen, I write to request that your institution immediately cease and desist from allowing your credit cards to be used to place ads on websites like Backpage.com.” Visa and Mastercard immediately folded in the face of Dart’s letter, and stopped serving Backpage. From How a Cashless Society Could Embolden Big Brother - The Atlantic Now, whatever you think about the morality of prostitution, there's something troubling about this. You can blame Visa and MasterCard for spinelessly caving to a form a...

xxx On a private chain with no cryptocurrencies, there is nothing that lives entirely on the chain. There is no asset whose existence is defined only by what's written on the chain. What you are actually transacting on the chain is a promise, for some recognised entity to give you something in exchange for that on-chain token. "You don't need complex computation to move the asset around because you are not directly moving the asset anyway. From How are banks actually going to use blockchains and smart contracts? xxx

xxx Banks close the accounts of customers they fear may be up to no good, evicting from the financial system those the government most wants to watch From Losing Count: U.S. Terror Rules Drive Money Underground - WSJ xxx

I have to say that I walked out of the inaugural Money 2020 Europe conference last week feeling rather smug. The reason for this unbecoming bout of self-satisfaction is that I was one of the people who lobbied the organisers of the event to stage it in Copenhagen! Boy, was this the right decision. The event had a few teething troubles, as they all do, but overall my response to it (and the overwhelming response of the majority of the delegates that I spoke to) was that it was an absolutely superb event that has already changed the landscape for fintech events in Europe for good. I take my hat off to the organisers for doing such a great job in creating an event with a European feel that was distinct from, yet complementary to, the Las Vegas event that spawned it. The venue was superb. The AC Bella Sky is apparently the largest hotel in Scandinavia . I loved the rooms, I loved the layout (especially the central atrium which meant that everybody bumped into everybody else during the co...

xxx My congratulations to the organisers - Anil Aggarwal, Jonathan Weiner and Pat Patel - for making sure this was a very European event. From money2020-europe-amazes-excites-and-raises-the-bar I strongly agree. 

As some of you may recall, I had the great good fortune to be asked to interview Spencer X from Google on the main stage at Money 2020 Europe in Copenhagen. Before I go on to what was discussed, let me first just go on record to sat what a great guy Spencer is. We discussed the general area of questions, but we did not discuss specific questions and we didn't rehearse any questions or answers. As a result, the interaction was interesting and lively and got great feedback from the delegates. I think companies and speakers can often benefit greatly from being a little less scripted at an event like this, so thanks to Spencer and Google for a great discussion. Oh, and for my VIP ticket to the Rudimental party in the evening. I'd never had a "Moscow Mule" before, and now I won't drink anything else. Hands down. The coolest non-millennial tonight @RudimentalUk was @dgwbirch no question pic.twitter.com/H4djFLZrkb — Zehra J Chudry (@ZJChudry) April 5, 2016 The...

xxx Statistics by Financial Fraud Action (FFA) UK show fraud losses on UK payment cards totalled £567.5 million in 2015, representing an 18% increase from £479 million one year before. From UK payment cards annual fraud losses hit £567.5 million xxx

xxx Contactless now makes up one in five of all face to face card payments under £30, figures show after a five fold increase in their use by shoppers. From Contactless soaring in popularity So tap and pay is a tenth of a card transactions and a fifth of all low-value transactions. Having been working on contactless payment projects of one form or another for yonks, I’m so happy to see us at the point where merchants now have to have signs to tell consumers that they can’t tap rather than that they can. [billy bishop POS] But there’s a better way to pay that is already growing, and that is in-app.

xxx In both Sweden and Norway, the migration to almost total “cashlessness” is being led from the bottom up. Bills and coins now represent just 2 percent of Sweden’s economy, compared with 10 percent in the euro-zone, and only about 20 percent of all consumer payments in Sweden have been made in cash From The Fate of Big Bills- a Catalyst for Digital Payments? | Ariadne Plaitakis | LinkedIn xxx

xxx Europol has reported that sometimes criminals will pay more than face value for large notes due to their transport convenience. From The Fate of Big Bills- a Catalyst for Digital Payments? | Ariadne Plaitakis | LinkedIn xxx

xxx Yet since 1998 the usefulness of these notes and their links to money laundering have been the subject of recurring European Parliamentary questions aimed at the European Commission, who has consistently denied jurisdiction in such matters, deferring to the ECB. The non-utility of these notes was, for example, highlighted in a 2011 ECB survey among households and companies in 2008 and 2009 that estimated that only around one-third of the 500-euro notes in circulation were used for transaction purposes and that the remainder were hoarded as store-of-value in the euro area or held abroad. From The Fate of Big Bills- a Catalyst for Digital Payments? | Ariadne Plaitakis | LinkedIn xxx

xxxx Android Pay, which allows owners of Android smartphones to tokenise their credit or debit cards and pay with their phones at contactless terminals, will launch in the UK "in the next few months", promises Google. From Does 'pay by app' mean an end to shopping queues? - BBC News In the US, Google have relaunched their wallet product without the physical debit that it had before. Google Wallet has been given a makeover, focussing peer-to-peer payments and wallet-to-bank transfers, making the physical card obsolete. From  Google ditches Wallet debit card xxx

xxx Tesco's move makes it the latest grocer to develop its own technology to bypass the costly Android and Apple systems. Sainsbury's for instance is trialling its SmartShop app which allows users to create their own shopping lists, navigate stores and make payments at dedicated kiosks, while Walmart has launched its own system in the US to expand customer payment options and increase the speed of checkouts in its stores. From Tesco takes on Apple with own mobile payment system - IGD Retail Analysis xxx