Snippets

xxx A Jixi resident said the supermarket had different – but poorly labelled – lanes for customers who paid by cash or with their phones. From A cashless supermarket, a bunch of grapes and the growing digital divide in China’s economy | South China Morning Post . xxx

xxx Apple’s next big revenue source won’t be another iPhone. It will be the monetization of the ID Apple assigns to its customers. From The Next Big Thing For Apple Stock Won't Be Another iPhone . xxx

xxx The growing “cashlessness” of Chinese cities threatens to expose underlying issues of economic instability. Mobile payments are carving out lines between young and old, and between the prosperous urban middle class and those left behind by the boom times. From China Can’t Afford a Cashless Society – Foreign Policy . xxx

xxx The court however curtailed the scope of the Aadhaar identification scheme, declaring that it would no longer be required to open bank accounts, obtain mobile telephone connections, admission to schools. From World's largest biometric ID system approved by Indian court as 1 billion enroll for welfare and tax . xxx

xxx India’s Supreme Court ruled that the country's controversial biometric identity scheme, the world's largest, is constitutional and does not violate the right to privacy. The court however curtailed the scope of the Aadhaar identification scheme, declaring that it would no longer be required to open bank accounts, obtain mobile telephone connections, admission to schools. From World's largest biometric ID system approved by Indian court as 1 billion enroll for welfare and tax . xxx

xxx As of 1 January 2018, all companies with a Chinese business licence – a necessity for operating in the country – were brought into the social credit system through the new licence requirement to have an 18-digit “unified social credit code”. Through this business ID number, the Chinese government keeps track of all businesses, reporting transgressions on its National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System, Hoffman said. The system extends to non-profits, NGOs, trade unions and social organisations after 30 June. From China’s social credit system ‘could interfere in other nations’ sovereignty’ | World news | The Guardian . xxx

xxx This has led to introduction of a legal requirement for banks and building societies to support app-to-app data flows, which will enable customers to approve TPPs via their bank or building society app. From Open Banking shouldn’t be written off, the revolution is just starting – FinTech Futures . xxx

xxx The network, called Red Belly Blockchain, was developed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the University of Sydney, and deployed over the Amazon Web Services (AWS) global cloud infrastructure. It was tested across 1,000 nodes in 14 countries at a benchmark rate of 30,000 transactions per second and with an average latency of three seconds. From Australian agency claims blockchain breakthrough . xxx

xxx Circle noted that USDC is built on openness and accountability, with commercial issuers required to be licensed to handle electronic money, to have audited AML and compliance programs, to back all tokens on a fully reserved basis and to provide monthly published proof of reserves, to support fungible exchange and redemption of USDC tokens from other authorized issuer members, and to meet other reporting and review requirements established by CENTRE. From Circle Rolls Out USD Coin | PYMNTS.com . More like Mondex than Bitcoin, frankly. So what is a “stablecoin” anyway? If it is meant to be a coin that maintains purchasing power over time then why would you back it with US dollars, which do not? If it is meant to be a coin that    Well, this was first tried donkey’s years’ ago when Digicash launched. The idea of of a crypto coin that represented a dollar, a euro, a pound or whatever. This   There’s a difference between a currency and a currency board. A currency board issues...

xxx A first time buyer whose dream to purchase a flat was temporarily derailed by a Barclays IT glitch yesterday faces heartbreak today as NatWest's banking system failed. From First-time buyer is left 'homeless' as Barclays and NatWest banking crash | Daily Mail Online . xxx

xxx “You’d never manage that these days – they could probably tell you what type of dog was doing the running for you.” From "Big Sam gave me a heart monitor and I strapped it to my dog" - Ex-Wanderer Ian Marshall recalls his pet hates in training | The Bolton News . xxx

xxx In the United States currently, there’s no legal requirement stipulating a financial institution must make a consumer’s financial data available to a third party in the event that a consumer provides affirmative consent. From U.S. way behind the curve on open banking | American Banker . xxx xxx While the Treasury Department cannot address the intrinsic, structural disadvantages in the U.S. regulatory regime, its recent call for all of the agencies in this space to align behind an interpretation of Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act — which asserts the ability of Americans to permission their financial data — is an important step towards a level playing field, From U.S. way behind the curve on open banking | American Banker .   xxx

xxx In a UK first, customers who receive a call from Barclays will now be able to choose to receive an alert in their app or online banking confirming the details of the employee who is calling them. From Barclays tackles phone scammers with caller ID feature . So good to see a bank doing this. I wrote 

Remember when, earlier this year, the main US carriers Verizon Wireless, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint (as the "Mobile Authentication Taskforce”) announced their plan to launch a mobile authentication solution that will be available to consumers by the end of 2018. The idea of it is to securely authenticate users by using their mobile number, IP address, SIM card attributes and so on, using machine learning and so forth to reduce the risks in mobile commerce. (They said at the time that the service would be interoperable with the GSMA’s Mobile Connect scheme, which is great). Well, they’ve now announced their “Project Verify” which will deliver authentication in mobile apps, negating the need for a traditional password. You can see the attraction for users: it means major convenience.

xxx Among Amazon Prime respondents, 65% would be willing to try a free online bank account offered by Amazon. Even among people who don’t buy through Amazon, 37% would be willing to try. Amazon customers are quite valuable. They control 75% of US household wealth From Can Amazon Take Customer Loyalty to the Bank? - Bain & Company . xxx

xxx For retail banks, the key lesson is that their main competition consists not of traditional banks, but rather the large technology firms such as Amazon that have upended entire industries. From Can Amazon Take Customer Loyalty to the Bank? - Bain & Company . xxx

xxx n 1303, a Persian vizier recounted the use of fingerprints as signatures during the Qin and Han Dynasties, noting, “Experience has shown that no two individuals have fingers precisely alike.” The Chinese had realized that before anyone: a Qin dynasty document from the third-century B.C.E, titled “The Volume of Crime Scene Investigation—Burglary,” pointed up fingerprints as a means of evincing whodunnit. From The Surprising History (and Future) of Fingerprints . xxx

Alex Brazier is the Executive Director for Financial Stability Strategy and Risk and a member of the Financial Policy Committee (FPC) at the Bank of England. He’s not a techno-utopian fintech hype merchant like me, he’s an economist. Earlier this year, he gave a speech  talking about open banking in which he said that “by allowing customers to connect to a range of banks and service providers through a single point, Open Banking could open to the door to the ‘unbundling’ of banking”. At Consult Hyperion we don’t think there’s any “could” about it but, as my colleague Tim Richards  wrote earlier this year , some banks will thrive in the world of open banking while will simply become utilities, highly regulated pools of capital. He goes on to say that while both models are acceptable - which is why some of the work we are doing helping clients to determine their open banking strategies is so interesting - as a bank surely it would be better to choose your strategy rather than being for...

xxx The feature allows new iPhones to conduct supported NFC transactions without the assistance of iOS. The specs for the iPhone XS list "Express Cards with power reserve" under all models. From New iPhones can conduct certain NFC transactions even when iOS is not running . xxx

xxx "September 13, 1968, the German engineers Juergen Dethloff (1924-2002) and Helmut Groettrup (1916-1981) filed a patent in Austria for their idea of an ‘identification circuit’." From "First Chip Card Patent Filed 50 Years Ago on September 13, 1968" . xxx

For the first decade or so, it was far from clear whether the credit card was continue to exist as a product at all, and as late as 1970 there were people predicting that banks would abandon the concept completely. What changed everything was technology: the introduction of the magnetic stripe and Visa’s BASE I online authorisation system. This changed the customer experience, transformed the risk management and cut costs dramatically. Everything changed with automated authorisation. I can’t resist pointing out that it was the London transit system that pioneered the use of magnetic stripes on the back of cardboard cards in a mass market product (seven years earlier, in 1964). The first transaction was at Stamford Brook station on 5th January 1964, well before BankAmericard (the precursor to Visa) introduced their first bank-issued magnetic stripe card in 1972 in conjunction with the deployment of the BASE I electronic authorisation system in 1973. As I wrote back in 2008 , setting ...

xxx We can see that we are going from 24.25GHz, right up to 86GHz. At this frequencies our wavelengths are 1.2 cm to 0.3cm. Our antennas will thus be between 0.6 cm and 0.15 cm long. As we move up 86GHz our capacity for data will move from just 240Mbps to 8.6Gbps. This is from a single wireless stream, and, if we use multiple paths, such as with MIMO antennas, we could multiple up this even more. Our Cat-5 cables will just seem so slow compared with this. The lower frequencies (24.25–27.5GHz) will be used for macro scale networks, and which provide a wide coverage (in the way our existing 4G networks do), but local networks will scale from small to ultra-small, and support higher frequencies. The higher the frequency we go, the more reliant that we are on line-of-sight communications, thus the higher frequencies will require more localised connections (and where signals can bounce off objects). From Get Ready for the Greatest Change in Our Digital World Since the Start of the Inter...

xxx It was all made possible by modern communications – the telegram, the phone, the telex, the fax, the email – and it allowed the world’s richest people to avoid the responsibilities of citizenship From The real Goldfinger: the London banker who broke the world | News | The Guardian . xxx

xxx It was all made possible by modern communications – the telegram, the phone, the telex, the fax, the email – and it allowed the world’s richest people to avoid the responsibilities of citizenship From The real Goldfinger: the London banker who broke the world | News | The Guardian . xxx

xxx Robinhood order data is used by large institutions to allow them to profit on order information ahead of retail customers, sometimes called “front running.” From Robinhood Crypto: The fine print behind 'free' crypto trading - The Block . xxx

xxx Clearly, we need identity custodians: an entity we can trust and call upon if we have a problem. Somebody who is able to give a key back when it’s lost. Ideally, we should be able to choose which identity custodian to use and switch as often as wanted. From The problem with self-sovereign identity: We can’t trust people . xxx

xxx Through Facebook groups (essentially forums), extremists can build large audiences. There are many examples of groups that feature anti-Muslim or antisemitic content daily, in an environment which, because critics are removed from the groups, normalises these hateful views. From Why I am seeking to stamp out online echo chambers of hate | Lucy Powell | Technology | The Guardian . xxx

xxx   According to the latest British Retail Consortium's (BRC) annual payments survey, cards were used to pay for £277.1 billion worth of goods in 2017, accounting for 76% of retail sales volume. Meanwhile, cash continued its decline both as a share of retail transactions (down 0.5%) and value of sales (down 1.2%), where it now make up just 22%. The BRC says that the rise of card payments is hitting its members in the pocket, with retailers spending an extra £170 million to process payments in 2017. Fees are now approaching £1 billion a year. From Card payments dominate UK retail sales as cash usage falls .   xxx xxx   "In fact many smaller retailers have questioned whether savings were ever passed on by card companies. The BRC are now looking to the Government and Regulator to tackle the alarming increases to card scheme fees imposed on retailers, and for action to simplify the complex fees and charges levied by the card payments industry." From Card payme...

xxx Just loading the main British Airways website spins up around 20 different scripts and loading the booking subpage bumps that to 30. While 30 scripts might not sound like much, many of these are minified scripts spanning thousands of lines of script. From The British Airways Breach: How Magecart Claimed 380,000 Victims . xxx

xxx "This Technology Quarterly will take a more sceptical view. It will point out that, despite a decade of development, bitcoin has failed in its stated objective: to become a usable currency." From "What to make of cryptocurrencies and blockchains - The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow" . xxx

Despite the fuss about it, the global gold standard only lasted for a century and it collapsed before World War II. Britain had created the standard in its modern form in 1821 and left it in 1931. Ernest Harvey, the Bank’s deputy governor at the time, wrote to Ramsay MacDonald, the prime minister, and Philip Snowden, the chancellor, on September 19, 1931, saying that reserves worth more than £100m were close to running out. "‘Gentlemen, His Majesty’s Government have given the most serious consideration to your letter of the 19th instant in which you inform them of the grave difficulties with which you are faced in meeting the obligation placed on the Bank of England by the Gold Standard Act… ‘His Majesty’s Government are of the opinion that the Bank of England should place such restrictions on the supply of gold as the Bank may deem requisite in the national interest.’" From "How the Bank of England abandoned the gold standard - Telegraph" .   As Ed Conway po...

I’m sure that by now you are all familiar with the major data breach that occurred at British Airways earlier this month. It was a “Magecart” attack on the scripts running on the BA web site (the booking page at BA runs 30 scripts, and remember that many of these are minified scripts spanning thousands of lines of code) . The breach was pretty serious: 380,000 customers were affected. In fact, it was so serious that “ shares of British Airways' parent company IAG fell around 4% as markets opened ” the day after it was reported. The stolen data included customers’ names, e-mail addresses, billing addresses and payment card information (including CVVs) but not passport details.  Since I had booked a fair few flights during this period, which included arranging for family members to attend a funeral, I didn't for one moment that my card details had been hijacked by cyber-criminals. I don’t really care though. If the Magecart miscreants do have my card details and use them to buy ...

The US Treasury's report on " Nonbank Financials, Fintech, and Innovation " prepared in response to Mr. Trump's "Executive Order 13772 on Core Principles for Regulating the United States Financial System" is, I have to say, most comprehensive. It covers a great many aspects of the financial services market, as you would imagine, and covers a few specific areas that I think are worth detailed consideration and due some real innovation. One of them is digital identity. The Treasury report says that digital identity systems may rely on various types of technology but generally involve two essential components: (1) identity proofing, enrollment, and credentialing; and (2) authentication. It then goes on to say that they may also involve (3) federation, which is optional, but allows identity to be portable. Indeed. This is a reasonable way to think about the problem. I presented this view at the MobeyForum Members’ Meeting in Paris, showing how these three c...

xxx The payment service will accomplish this by maintaining a private blockchain that records transactions from Square-managed wallets in real-time From Bitcoin Accepted [Everyw]here: Square Patents Crypto Payment Network . So, basically, if you send cryptocurrency from a Square cryptocurrency wallet to another Square cryptocurrency wallet, Square will credit the recipient in near-real time and take the risk that you don’t then go and send the same cryptocurrency to someone else. (Note: To operate such a system, you don’t need wallets or blockchains. You could just use a database and call it Square-PESA.)