Snippets

The combination of OAuth 2.o and OpenID Connet is a good way to balance the demands of open banking and GDPR.

As was explained to me on a trip to Shanghai in 2017, Alipay built bilateral relationships with individual banks, in effect becoming a clearing centre. Other “third party” systems followed so the Chinese central bank required them to create a single central clearing system. So now there is Unionpay for debit and the “Internet Association” for mobile payments.

xxx "It’s possible we use just simple Merkle trees and hash chains, but we call them Blockchain" From "Blockchain and Voting | Benlog" . xxx

xxx "ICOs need a competent legal framework and until governments allocate resources to modernize outmoded laws, ICO teams will follow the path of least resistance and raise funds in the most friction-free manner possible." From "ICOs: The Beauty, the Beast and JFK - CoinDesk" . xxx

xxx "As well as the changes to the verification requirements, the new rules, which come into force on April 1, stipulate that all companies providing bar code-based payment services must obtain both an online payment licence and a bank card receipt business licence, and that all cross-bank transactions involving bar codes must be channelled through the PBOC’s or other approved clearing system." From "China’s central bank tightens security in US$5.5 trillion QR code payment services | South China Morning Post" . xxx

Back in 2014, Tom Noyes (who I always take very seriously on this kind of thing) put it another way. He said... "Yes it would be completely wierd to launch a consumer brand called AppleIdenityBroker.. But ApplePay doesn’t quite capture the #1 retailer challenge: knowing WHO their consumers are" From "Brokering Identity - Part 1 - Noyes Payments Blog" . xxx

xxx "‘Personally, I think zk-SNARKs are a hugely important, absolutely game-changing technology,’ Buterin tells Fortune. ‘They are the single most under-hyped thing in cryptography right now.’" From "Zcash: Meet Zooko Wilcox, the Man Building a Better Bitcoin | Fortune" . xxx

Dunkirk. Whenever I see something on TV or read something about Dunkirk, it makes me think about my grandad. He was there. Not only was he there, he was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) for his bravery. Here is the citation from the British Army record:  WO2 (RQMS) Acting WO1 Supt Clerk Walter William Page DCM, Royal Signals This WO is Superintending Clerk to SO in C. He was sent from Premesques late on 26th May in charge of 10 other ranks to report to an officer at Dunkirk. For various means the rendezvous miscarried and RSM Page tried to reach the Signal office in Dunkirk. Being prevented by burning buildings in this object, he went to the docks in search of an officer. There he found an officer of the Merchantile Marine in command of a supply ship to be unloaded. He collected about 150 men of various arms and departments in the dock area and kept them at work unloading through the 27th under heavy bombing attacks, until an ammunition ship alongside was bombed and set...

snippet We need a more robust pipeline of available workers to support the growth in the industry. [From Take On Payments - Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta ] snippet

snippet Japan Airlines Co. said it has been defrauded out of ¥384 million ($3.4 million) after receiving emails earlier this year that called for the payments of lease fees and commissions into bank accounts in Hong Kong. [From  Japan Airlines falls victim to email fraud, paying out ¥384 million to Hong Kong accounts | The Japan Times ] snippet

xxx "If Estonia succeeds with its plan to create a token for its e-residents to trade in, it could be the monetary glue to hold its ‘digital nation’ together. Electronic payments specialist Dave Birch theorized in his book, Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin, that the future of money is one where ‘community is no longer geography,’ and it’s communities who will have the most to gain from issuing their own, customized forms of money." From "Estonia's planning an ICO for estcoins despite Mario Draghi's warning — Quartz" . It’s very kind of 

xxx “These guys, they don’t tip like they used to, because they don’t have the cash in their pockets like they used to,” said Mark, an elevator operator at an upscale Manhattan co-op, talking about his building’s tenants. From Casualties of the Cashless Society: Those Who Get Seasonal Tips - The New York Times xxx

xxx "‘Market cap’ is even worse. It’s literally just whatever the last price was, multiplied by the number of tokens in existence. This is a bogus number that’s not actually applicable to anything — it’s not money that was put into the crypto, it’s not a realisable value like a company market cap, it doesn’t affect prices — it’s just an easily-calculated splashy-looking number that looks good in a headline. Trading is so thin in any crypto, even Bitcoin, that you could never realise a fraction of the number. It is literally just marketing." From "Why you can’t cash out pt 1: Why Bitcoin’s “price” is largely fictional | Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain" . xxx

xxx "Update, 11 December: The Payments Strategy Forum has outlined plans for a new payments system architecture in the UK… The Forum has outlined that customers wishing to make a bank transfer will have to now enter the exact name on the account, as well as the other details."   From "How do you want banks to protect you from scams?" . xxx xxx The system will be available from December 2018, although it will be voluntary as to whether your bank offers it to you when you make a payment" From "How do you want banks to protect you from scams?" .   xxx

xxx Your name and navigation history is valuable personal information. The UK Metropolitan Polices’ 'Digital Control Strategy' identifies infotainment systems in cars, which store this information, as a new forensic opportunity. From Connected Rental Cars Leak Personal Driver Data - Infosecurity Magazine xxx

xxx Munchee, a San Francisco-based company, had told investors that they were buying a “utility” token, because the digital coin could be used within the app to buy goods and services at a later stage. In a whitepaper, Munchee had also told investors that the token “does not pose a significant risk of implicating federal securities laws.” But the SEC said that the company led investors to believe that the value of tokens would increase and be traded on secondary markets — thereby classifying them as securities, which must be registered with the regulator. From Food app calls off ICO after SEC declares its tokens are unregistered securities xxx

xxx "Discover has become the latest credit card company to get rid of signatures as a means of verifying a cardholder’s identity… it’s becoming increasingly rare for consumers actually sign real letters when signing at check-outs" From "Discover announces that it will do away with signatures by April 2018" . xxx To be honest I think I’ll miss signing for purchases in America. xxx

xxx "Technology is changing every industry and it is impossible for me to believe it won’t change our financial system. That’s particularly true because our current system—while stable—is imperfect. Cryptocurrencies can be more secure and more efficient to exchange. They can be inflation-proof and are easier to settle and easier to interoperate. " From "Start Up: China’s LinkedIn friends, notching Huawei?, gender pay improbability, bitcoin redux, and more | The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say" . xxx xxx "While certainly a disruptive idea, evolving our current financial system to take advantage of cryptocurrencies is not a crazy one." From  "Start Up: China’s LinkedIn friends, notching Huawei?, gender pay improbability, bitcoin redux, and more | The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say" . xxx

xxx "Bloomberg estimates only 1,000 individuals own 40% of available bitcoin, while the majority of bitcoin creation (mining) itself is also a tight-knit oligopoly." From "On Fascism, Identity, Cryptoassets and the Future of Censorship" . xxx

I saw a fascinating presentation by Ursula Schilling on Infineon on “Securing the Quantum Computer World” in which said was talking about the need to develop cryptography that will be resistant to attacks from quantum computers. It’s a live topic, because if the figures she presented are approximately correct and there will be quantum computers capable of making practical attacks on RSA/ECC with 15-20 years, that means that information currently being secure using asymmetric cryptography (eg, Bitcoin) is essentially being put into the public domain!

xxx "‘To explain that, one needs investors who are (in our specific case) irrational, woefully uninformed, or endowed with very strange preferences.’" From "How to Price Hard Forks – Jill Carlson – Medium" . xxx

I was amazed to hear at Vendorcom that 30% of population's income doesn't get reconciled at HMRC and DWP for reasons such as they only handle RTI from BACS and lots of people use faster payments. Now I understand! Having recently had occasion to send money to HMRC, I was very surprised to receive a threatening letter from them a month or so later. I can't remember exactly what it said, but it was something along the lines of "we've giving up on chasing Google and Richard Branson, so if you don't send us tenner the boys are coming round to sort you out". Shocked, I logged on to my HMRC business account to see that it said that a) I owed them the tenner and b) I'd sent them a tenner that was sitting there "unallocated". I phoned up and the nice woman up North somewhere said that she would "allocate" the tenner to the money I owed them and it was all good. Afterwards, I did wonder why they thought I'd sent them a tenner (ie, was i...

xxx People may baulk at sharing access to personal data yet millions are happily using online banking and enjoying the functionality of their bank’s online app. Millions more are content to share all kinds of personal data with Google and Facebook, which already offers debit card-linked payments in the UK via its Messenger app. From Will you let a stranger look deep into your bank account? xxx

Felix Martin, writing in the Daily Telegraph (5th December 2017) says that "We will end by thanking the monetary cranks for inducing some policy sanity – and making our national financial systems fit for purpose once again", meaning (if I understand him correctly) that while bitcoin may not in the long run prove to be a viable alternative to the existing fiat currency infrastructure, it will stimulate the development of things that are and thus make money more suited to the new economy.

xxx ERC-725 specifically defines and standardizes the actions all identity implementations need to take, such as adding claims to the smart contract and the mechanism for obtaining those claims later. From The Father of the ICO Is All About Identity Now - CoinDesk xxx

xxx The "petro" will be backed by Venezuela's key natural resources (diamonds, gas, gold and oil) and, in theory, will help it get around the "financial blockade" imposed by the US and other nations. From Venezuela will start its own digital currency to beat sanctions xxx

xxx But there is a risk for banks that customers move away from their own apps or online services, weakening their relationship and thwarting their ability to cross-sell. It could leave banks as the plumbing behind the scenes, used to facilitate the movement of money. From UK banks prepare to share customer data in radical shake-up xxx

xxx truthfully answering secret questions is a surefire way to get your online account hacked From San Francisco Rail System Hacker Hacked — Krebs on Security xxx

xxx Why Hong Kong has Mao to thank for ID cards From Design of new Hong Kong smart identity card revealed | South China Morning Post Well, we can’t testify to any input from Mao, but we certainly can testify to the great job that Consult Hyperion did helping to design this, the world’s first modern (ie, smart) national identity card, all those years ago! Which set me thinking. Half a century ago, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan who predicted that seismic social shift that the coming online environment would cause in human relationships  said of it that  “In the new electric world, where everybody is involved with everybody, where everybody is involved in complex processes, the old identity cards, the old means of finding out who am I, will not work”.   Indeed. So what will work? McLuhan had this notion of identity as smeared across entities, depending on the relationships and interactions between identities (what Ian Grigg calls “edge” identity). IN t So what will work? ...

xxx Amazon Pay is coming soon to apps developed for Amazon’s Alexa by third-party developers… A developer preview made available yesterday also indicated that Alexa’s Amazon Pay-powered skills will expanded more dramatically in 2018. From Amazon Pay Comes To Alexa Skills | PYMNTS.com xxx

xxx On Nov. 20, hacked emails show that he successfully extorted 63 bitcoins (~$45,000) from a U.S.-based manufacturing firm. From San Francisco Rail System Hacker Hacked — Krebs on Security xxx

Thanks to Richard van Arnholt for pointing out to me that NIST now states that if authentication is used via sms (out-of-band), ‘the verifier SHALL verify that the pre-registered telephone number being used is associated with a specific physical device. […] Verifiers SHOULD consider risk indicators such as device swap, SIM change, number porting, or other abnormal behavior before using the PSTN to deliver an out-of-band authentication secret.’ xxx

xxx Blockchain could become the future of the passport. It is a transparent and tamper-proof ledger, which can be used to verify a person’s identity. From Blockchain: the future of the passport? | Reform This sounds like typical magical thinking, but if you look at the diagram in their report, what it actually shows is something not entirely crazy. The idea would be to have some form of government shared ledger (let’s call it the UKLegder) that is validated by a number of public bodies.

xxx Instead, du Toit predicts, banks will partner with Amazon and others. Lenders would manufacture financial products, and tech giants would serve as distribution and servicing channels. In other words, what Amazon already does with consumer goods. Yet because distribution accounts for two-thirds of banking profits, according to a McKinsey & Co. report, banks may not love being relegated to mere factories for mortgages and credit cards. And because Amazon wouldn’t have to pay to lure customers -- it already has millions of them -- it could afford to set up digital accounts without “all the nuisance fees and relatively high minimum balances” that lenders impose From Consumers Want Tech Firms to Take On the Banks - Bloomberg xxx

The “meme” that banks are, essentially, a special kind of technology company (special because they are granted special privileges that other companies do not have, such as the ability to create money) is common. Here's what Christian Edelmann and Patrick Hunt  said in the Harvard Business Review : "Technology specialists will play a greater role in allocating investments, working alongside senior management from a more traditional background". From my early experiences as an advisors to boards, I can see the dynamics at work here. To pick an obvious topic, some financial organisations' early response to open banking was to see Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as something to do with technology and therefore not strategic. This left them on the back as   xxx Instead, du Toit predicts, banks will partner with Amazon and others. Lenders would manufacture financial products, and tech giants would serve as distribution and servicing channels. In other words, ...

xxx Facebook’s new “proactive detection” artificial intelligence technology will scan all posts for patterns of suicidal thoughts, and when necessary send mental health resources to the user at risk or their friends, or contact local first-responders. From Facebook rolls out AI to detect suicidal posts before they’re reported | TechCrunch This is admirable, of course. No-one would say otherwise. But it must be transparently obvious that the same technology could detect all sorts of other patterns as well.

xxx The advancements made in social media analytics empower deciphering social media data to forecast impending life events… The ability to discern such events in advance can certainly help retail banks in targeting customers – current and future, with personalized products and offerings that are most relevant to them. From Banks need to swipe their 'social media' cards to pay up for Person... xxx

xxx The number of young people caught acting as "money mules" has doubled in the past four years, according to the UK's fraud prevention service, Cifas From Number of young people acting as 'money mules' doubles - BBC News xxx

xxx The group in Shaoguan is accused of moving money illegally using 148 bank accounts opened in 20 provinces with stolen identity cards, according to Xinhua. From China Reports Breaking Up Gang That Moved $3 Billion Abroad - Bloomberg xxx

Identity fraud is absolutely out of control in the UK and there is, so far as I can see, no prospect of any form of infrastructure coming into place to deal with the problem. Whether we look at scammers going through Facebook to perpetrate dating fraud or going through LinkedIn to perpetrate invoice fraud or going through the Land Registry to perpetrate property fraud or going through Companies House to perpetrate corporate fraud, we can draw only one conclusion:  identity is broken . Until we fix identity, we can’t attack fraud. And since it’s going to take a while to fix identity, even if we start now, that means that fraud is going to carry on getting worse. Don’t believe me? Then listen to a bank: [Barclays] is predicting that online festive fraud will be at its highest ever levels in December 2017 and could cost shoppers more than £1.3bn. From Barclays warns of unprecedented online fraud this Christmas Well, here’s wishing you a Happy New Year! The truth is that we are under ...

xxx Less clear cut, however, are likely to be arguments over digital currencies issued by central banks. Like cash, which they could eventually replace — but unlike bitcoin — they would be backed by monetary authorities, so they would also act as a store of value as well as widely accepted means of payment. From Central banks should embrace digital currencies, Axel Weber says xxx

xxx The financial revolution due to hit Britain in mid-January has had surprisingly little publicity and has little to do with the money-related things making news headlines over the last few years. In other words, it's not a new technology, not even a cryptocurrency. Instead, this revolution is regulatory: banks will be required to open up access to their accounts to third parties. From net.wars: Regulatory disruption xxx

xxx Police can’t force you to turn over your passcode, but they can, theoretically, force you to unlock the phone with your face. From Apple plans to share some iPhone X Face ID data. Uh oh. xxx

xxx On Friday, Estonia's Police and Border Guard suspended an estimated 760,000 ID cards known to be affected by the crypto vulnerability. From Flaw crippling millions of crypto keys is worse than first disclosed | Ars Technica xxx xxx The country is now issuing cards that use elliptic curve cryptography instead of the vulnerable RSA keys, which are generated by a code library developed and sold by German chipmaker Infineon. From  Flaw crippling millions of crypto keys is worse than first disclosed | Ars Technica xxx

xxx Reporters found that, in Shanghai, some shops even ask consumers to apply for a membership card if consumers want to use cash, and others hang "no cash" signs on their doors, Laodong Daily reported Thursday. From Shanghai shops refusing cash are illegal: authority - Global Times xxx

xxx modesty forbids me from noting Consult Hyperion’s role in the project, so I’ll let Finextra do it instead From NFC drivers | Consult Hyperion xxx

xxx To those who believe bitcoin's main innovation is the exclusion of a central authority -- a peer-to-peer system in which transactions are validated by "miners" -- the interest of China and Russia is baffling. But those governments aren't looking to give up control to the blockchain. On the contrary, they are trying to figure out how to lower the cost for a centralized issuer to control everything that's going on in the financial system.  From Authoritarian Cryptocurrencies Are Coming - Bloomberg xxx

xxx Royal Bank of Canada's chief executive says data is the battleground for banks that will determine the future success of financial institutions. From RBC CEO Dave McKay: Battleground for banks is data - Article - BNN xxx

xxx FURIOUS Nationwide customers had their payments declined and were locked out of their accounts when the bank's system went down yesterday. From Nationwide customers 'bank cards suddenly stopped working' after technical glitch The system went down. But what if there was no system to go down? Imagine that each ATM is a node in a shared ledger. Suppose a bank has a million customers, and each customer’s transaction record is 1Kb. A balance, last few transactions, that sort of thing. No need to store the whole transaction history in the ledger. That’s 1Gb. Maybe 10Gb for all of the bank customers in the UK. I have a flash drive in my bag with 128Gb on it and it cost like $50. Now, when someone draws money from an ATM the ledger is updated over a few minutes at all of the other ATMs (remember, ATMs are doing nothing most of the time). If an ATM goes down, so what? Just go to another one. When an ATM comes back, the ledger will update.

xxx While individual organizations in the public health network share the same overall mission, a complex mishmash of data usage agreements and government privacy rules dictate which members can access information and which ones can modify it. From Why the CDC Wants in on Blockchain - MIT Technology Review A blockchain, I guarantee, won’t make any difference to this. Those privacy rules don’t depend on whether you store the data in a spreadsheet or a database and they don’t depend on whether the data is in a shared ledger of some form either. How should identities, not only patient IDs but also the IDs of public health organizations, be managed on the blockchain? From  Why the CDC Wants in on Blockchain - MIT Technology Review If Open Banking is a success, then banks are going to fail. One viable picture of the future is of a few giant megabucks sitting in the background, like PG&E or British Gas, while other banks go to the wall and consumers obtain their financial servi...

xxx The banks’ response to the growth of the Zelle network follows positive statistics from the service itself, which reported 100 million transactions in September 2017 totaling $33.6 billion. From One Year After Rollout, Banks Are Bullish on Zelle | Bank Innovation | Bank Innovation xxx

According to the Daily Mail, the police have seen an " explosion in the use of digital currency by criminals who are strolling into cafes, newsagents and corner shops to dump their ill-gotten gains in virtual currency ATMs ". Well, let’s hope so because Bitcoin isn’t fungible (unlike the £50 notes so helpfully provided to the criminal fraternity by the - yes, couldn’t make this up - Bank of England) which means that the money can be traced from wallet to wallet so that should make it easier for these detectives to get a handle on where the ill-gotten gains are heading. While I remain concerned about the rise of Bitcoin for reasons of consumer protection, I am much less concerned about its use in crime. First of all, if the demand for Bitcoin were about crime (and not speculation) is would actually be worth far less than it is today. There just isn’t enough crime. Calculations based on the use of Bitcoin in this sector of the economy put its value at something like one-twenti...

xxx Alt-right blogger Jenna Abrams (@Jenn_Abrams) enjoyed a large following in Twitter, and her tweets were cited by Buzzfeed, the NY Times, and other news agencies. It turned out "she" was another creation of the Internet Research Agency, the Russian government-funded troll farm in St. Petersburg. From An alt-right Tweeter with 80k followers is a fictional entity created by Russian troll farm / Boing Boing xxx

xxx Criminals are exploiting the gift card loophole to commit financial fraud for a myriad of reasons, including money laundering, and as a way of moving illicit funds by drug cartels and terrorists. From The evolution of gift card fraud » PaymentEye xxx

xxx One in five cash points will disappear from Britain's high streets within four years, according to the ATM industry body.  From One in five ATMs set to close over next four years xxx

From time to time, when making presentations about identity and related topics, I have to stop to explain to baffled foreigners that the United Kingdom has no national identification scheme or identity card or any other such symbol of continental tyranny, so our gold standard identity document is the gas bill. I understand that these are notoriously difficult to forge and that the skilled artisans behind the North Korean $100 bill “ supernote ” threw down their tools in frustration when faced with the multiple layers of security that are part of the British Gas quarterly statement for residential users. Hence our gas bill  is a uniquely trusted document , and the obvious choice of platform for anyone concerned about fraud. (By the way, if for some reason you do not have a gas bill to attest to your suitability for some purpose or other,  you can buy one here  for theatrical or novelty use only.) No wonder identity fraud is an epidemic in the UK. Fraudsters are ruthless about exploiti...

xxx According to research published in the Journal of the European Economic Association, the level of trust in cultures today can be informed by events that occurred hundreds of years ago. The research shows that Italian states that became free cities in the Middle Ages – a process that required mass cooperation – exhibit higher levels of trust today than those that didn’t. From Chinese Government rolls out trust ratings to combat corruption | World Finance xxx

xxx The Chinese Government’s new tool to generate trust is known as ‘social credit’, and is currently in the process of being rolled out. The plan is to generate a score for every citizen based on how trustworthy they are. The system will aim to instil trust by combining carrot and stick: those with a good score will reap rewards, while a bad score will lead to punishments, such as public blacklisting and restrictions. From Chinese Government rolls out trust ratings to combat corruption | World Finance Now, in one way, this is a back to the future thing. When we all lived in clans and roamed the savannah, the social credit score of each and every one of us was stored in the “shared ledger” of the memories of the clan members.

xxx the regulations that govern this area. These state that a bank has to “have made clear to their customer how a Chaps payment will be processed” and that the bank “will make a payment solely on the basis of a unique identifier and will not execute it on the basis of the intended recipient’s name”. From ‘We lost £120,000 in an email scam but the banks won’t help get it back’ | Money | The Guardian xxx

xxx Lloyds, which took eight hours to make the payment, did not carry out any checks to ensure the name of the firm to which the payment was to be made matched the account numbers, From ‘We lost £120,000 in an email scam but the banks won’t help get it back’ | Money | The Guardian Neither Lloyds, nor any other bank do this. That’s just how the system works: the account name is an attribute, not an identifier.

There's a huge amount of payment fraud going on in the UK at the moment. The fraudsters intercept legitimate requests to transfer money from one account to another, often from solicitors in relation to house purchases but also from tradespersons such as builders) and they change the details so that the payer sends the money to an account under the control of the fraudsters rather than the intended destination. So, typically, the fraudsters will monitor e-mails coming from a solicitor and when that solicitor sends an email to a customer asking for money (e.g., for a house purchase), the fraudsters replace solicitor's legitimate account details with details of another account that they control. I wrote about this ages ago and put forward the obvious solution, which is to stop using e-mail for important transactions, but nobody paid any attention, and the problem continued to grow. In the first half of this year there were about 20,000 such frauds with some £100m lost (and only £2...

xxx "While most of the ICOs to date have been Utility Tokens, because of the massive advantages that Security Tokens have over traditional capital raising, I think the total market cap of all security tokens will be much larger than the total market cap of all utility tokens." From "7 Thoughts On Blockchain, Cryptocurrency & Decentralization After Another Three Months Down The…" . xxx

xxx NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - May 03, 2016) - SmartMetric, Inc. (OTCQB: SMME) -- According to a research report conducted by the research organization The Nilson Report, for 2015 through 2020, card fraud worldwide is expected to total $183.29 billion. In 2020, global card fraud is projected to exceed $35.54 billion. Fraud, grew by 19%, and outpaced volume, which grew by 15%. Fraud losses by banks and merchants on all cards issued worldwide reached $16.31 billion in 2014 when global card volume for the same period totaled $28.844 trillion. From Annual Global Card Fraud to More Than Double Reaching Over $35 Billion in Four Years My general sense of the industry, without giving away anyone’s figures, is that not only is fraud growing faster than volume, but that merchants are annoyed because declines are growing faster than fraud. We need a sea change in tackling fraud and I think there are two parts to this: changing the security vs. convenience model at the front end and changin...

As the former governor of the Bank of England, Meryvn King, has eloquently pointed out, banks are institutions that pre-date modern capitalism and “owe much to the technologies of an earlier age” (The End of Alchemy, 2016). There is no reason to expect them to continue in this form under the technological, regulatory, social and business pressures for change that are about to overwhelm them. If that sounds like waffle futurism that does not need to be taken seriously, you could not be more wrong. In the UK, those changes are going to begin in January when the world of “open banking” is created by the implementation of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) “remedies”. That is, the nine largest banks are compelled to provide Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for third-party applications to access bank accounts, a milestone in a long journey to bring a revolutionary degree of competition to the sector. This all rooted in the frustration of the regulators to see more competi...

xxx   The Riksbank governor, Stefan Ingves, called for new legislation to secure public control over the payments system, arguing that being able to make and receive payments is a “collective good” like defence, the courts, or public statistics. From "Being cash-free puts us at risk of attack": Swedes turn against cashlessness | World news | The Guardian .   xxxPuerto Rico "Cash only," said Abraham Lebron, the store manager standing guard at Supermax, a supermarket in San Juan's Plaza de las Armas. He was in a well-policed area, but admitted feeling like a sitting duck with so many bills on hand. "The system is down, so we can't process the cards. It's tough, but one finds a way to make it work." From In a Cashless World, You'd Better Pray the Power Never Goes Out - Slashdot xxx xxx If I was the manager of Waitrose after the Woking earthquake, then I would simply accept payment by writing down card numbers, or photocopying dr...

xxx Shares of jewelers climbed in India after the government withdrew an order that brought the industry under anti money-laundering legislation, a move that comes just as gold buying improves before the Hindu festival of Diwali, the peak season for demand. Jewelers were included in the Prevention of Money-Laundering Act in August, increasing compliance requirements. Buyers have been shying away from making purchases as they had to provide their income tax identity for transactions above 50,000 rupees ($766), hindering high-value deals. From Jewelers Rally After India Anti-Money-Laundering Rule Reversal - Bloomberg xxx

xxx Mass cash stashing might signal a widespread fear of a looming apocalypse – or, more prosaically, it could signal rampant illegality. From In the contactless payment era, why is cash making a comeback? | Business | The Guardian xxx

I’m not sure if you’re supposed to have a favourite supply chain fraud or not but I do, and it is the famous case of the vegetable oil that almost bankrupted American Express (and went some way toward making Warren Buffet a multi-billionaire). The essence of the story is that a conman, Anthony “Tino” De Angelis, discovered that people would lend him money on the basis of commodities in the supply chain. His chosen commodity was vegetable oil (see How The Salad Oil Swindle Of 1963 Nearly Crippled The NYSE ). Amex had a division that made loans to businesses using inventories as collateral. They gave De Angelis financing for vegetable oil and he took the Amex receipts to a broker who discounted them for cash. So he had tanks of vegetable oil and Amex had loaned him money against the value of the oil in those tanks, the idea being that they would get the money back with a bit extra when the oil was sold on. Now as it happened, the tanks didn’t much contain oil at all. They were mostly wat...

xxx ‘found worrying or nasty in some way’ From Making Britain the safest place in the world to be online - GOV.UK Yes, well I find things like this every single day on the internet. For example, I am very worried about 

xxx A new social media code of practice… From Making Britain the safest place in the world to be online - GOV.UK And so forth. There’s no point elucidating, because the strategy is, broadly speaking, to do nothing. A voluntary programme to ask people not to bully each other on Facebook. Publishing advertisements to tell people to be nice to each other is pointless. 

xxx While the implausible nature of the $9 billion price tag may have been a red flag to human traders, Apple did briefly see its stock rise to $158 before settling back down to around $156, raising the possibility that some algos were fooled. From Fake news: Dow Jones blames technical error for headlines claiming... xxx

Perhaps the universe was telling me something, because it seems to me beyond coincidence that I don’t remember hearing the word “ homophily ” before and yet I’ve just come across it twice in the same day: once when listening to historian  Niall Ferguson on the BBC’s Today programme while in the shower and then again a couple of hours later while reading Geoff Mulgan ’s new book “ Big Mind ” on the couch. Homophily means the tendency of people (e.g., me) to tend to congregate online with people who think the same as they do (e.g., the Chancellor of the Exchequer is very probably insane) but worse still in the new online world, also view only “news” (fake or real) that reinforces their position. We will come back to homophily in a moment. Geoff’s thesis is that the "collective intelligence” formed from groups of people connected together online functions according to new dynamics. Now, while he notes early on that a more networked world does not automatically means a higher IQ w...

xxx “Zero-knowledge proofs are one of the biggest inventions in the last two decades in cryptography,” said Emin Gun Sirer, an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University. It “will allow a slew of applications we can’t even imagine right now.” From ‘Mind-Boggling’ Math Could Make Blockchain Work for Wall Street - Bloomberg xxx

As I’ve written many times (e.g.,  here ), it is difficult to overestimate the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the financial services industry. As  Wired magazine  said, "it is no surprise that AI tops the list of potentially disruptive technologies”. With  Forrester  further forecasting that a quarter of financial sector jobs will be “impacted” by AI before 2020, there’s an urgent need to develop strategies in this. It is  because the need is so urgent that I was delighted to be asked to give a keynote at the  Digital Jersey AI Retreat  in September, an  event was put together by my good friends at  Digital Jersey  (where I am advisor to the board) working with  Cognitive Finance . T hey did a great job of bringing together a spectrum of both subject matter experts and informed commentators to cover a wide variety of issues and provide a great platform for learning. In “ Radical Technologies ”, Adam Greenfield wrote of  the advance of automation that many of us (me inc...

xxx According to RBA estimates, the merchant will pay an average of about 0.55 per cent of the transaction's value in a "merchant service fee" to their bank when the payment goes through the credit card network. But if it goes through the eftpos (CHQ or SAV) system, this drops to 0.15 per cent. From The hidden cost of the tap-and-go boom xxx

xxx Officers initially confiscated his passport before Ali changed his name by deed poll and applied for a new one, flying to Dubai two days before he was to be tried for possessing a quantity of bullets. From Arab driver filmed himself in his Porsche going 180mph | Daily Mail Online xxx

snippet To maintain their cover, undercover detectives were posting and sharing abuse material on Childs Play. Other users continued to post and view images while the site was under police control. [From Australian police sting brings down paedophile forum on dark web | Society | The Guardian ] snippet