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xxx "The [HMRC Report] found widespread infiltration of government agencies, to obtain false identities and 'sensitive information'. From one company investigators found '20 potential internal fraud cases including [gang] members in government agencies', one intelligence summary said. Another said two Post Office employees seemed to be helping falsify documents, concluding: 'infiltration is widespread'." From "Gangsters with links to the 7/7 London bombings stole £8billion from British taxpayers | Daily Mail Online" . xxx

xxx "Russian police are searching for a plastic surgeon with 'fake qualifications' who left her patients 'disfigured,' say reports." From "Russian police hunt 'Frankenstein' plastic surgeon who 'left her patients disfigured' | Daily Mail Online" . xxx

I notice that in the considerable press comment concerning the possible introduction of a Facebook payment system and perhaps even a Facebook currency of some kind, commentators continually refer to a Facebook “stablecoin”. I am certain that they are wrong to use this term, because it does not mean what they think it means. I may well be facing a losing battle about this, but I am stickler for correct currency terminology. So. Stablecoin. What? In the Bank of England’s excellent “Bank Underground” blog, there was a post on this topic that said "The chances of a stablecoin keeping a stable price depends on its design. There are generally two designs of stablecoin: those backed by assets, and those that are unbacked or ‘algorithmic’”. They are right, of course, but I have slightly more granular classification of designs: Algorithmic Currencies, in which algorithms manage supply and demand to obtain stability of the digital currency. This is what a stable cryptocurrency is: si...

xxx I have no idea why my debit card has either a magnetic stripe or embossing, and it’s not clear to me why it has my name and bank account number on it either, and I don’t know why it has a signature strip on the back when I don’t want to use it for signature transactions under any circumstances. From Counterfeit card fraud in the US will fall, eventually | Consult Hyperion . xxx

xxx Why doesn’t my bank put a token in my Apple Pay that doesn’t disclose my name or any other personal information, a “stealth card” that I can use to buy adult services online using the new Safari in-browser Apple Pay experience? This would be a simple win-win: good for the merchants as it will remove CNP fraud and good for the customers as it will prevent the next Ashley-Madison catastrophe. Keep my real identity safe in the value, give me blank card to top shopping with – a simple use case that will test the viability of the concept. From Tired: Banks that store money. Wired: Banks that store identity | Consult Hyperion . xxx

Crazy Cards Six years  I said that " I have no idea why my debit card has either a magnetic stripe or embossing, and it’s not clear to me why it has my name and bank account number on it either, and I don’t know why it has a signature strip on the back when I don’t want to use it for signature transactions under any circumstances ”.  Then in 2014, I asked “ Why is there a magnetic stripe on my card at all? ” as I could not see even then why my debit card had a magnetic stripe on it and I had no intention of ever using my debit card (the subject of the discussion) in a POS terminal at all, let alone a POS in the USA where there was no chip. It’s all different now, of course, because the US has gone over to chip and PIN as well.   Putting numbers and signatures on cards helps criminals. There’s no need for it. A couple of years later, I asked in " Tired: Banks that store money. Wired: Banks that store identity ” why my bank didn’t put a token in my Apple Pay that doesn’t d...

xxx Know ID Workshop, Part 1: Will Robots Need Passports? from David Birch xxx Know ID Workshop, Part 2: Who Will Give Robots Passports? from David Birch xxx

At Money20/20 Asia in Singapore this year, I had the privilege of charing the opening session on day two. The session was called "Wake Up with the CEOs" and the idea was to have a session where the audience could listen in on a discussion between people at the top of the industry, discussing the issues of the day. I have to say that from the feedback I got, it turned out to be a brilliant idea. Mind you, with a panel comprising Ron Kalifa (Vice Chairman of Worldpay ), Aldi Haryopratomo (CEO of GO-PAY, here talking on CNBC ), Rohan Mahadevan (SVP International Markets of PayPal) and Laurent Le Moal (CEO of PayU) it would have been difficult to make it boring. There was no shortage of issues to discuss, one of them being that Worldpay (which The Economist called a “ payments plumber ”) is merging with FIS to create a $43 billion industry behemoth with the power to re-shape the sector (and with the announcement that they are enabling AmazonPay for their online merchants, they...

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xxx Telecom players may opt for QR-based KYC method instead of Aadhaar From Thanks But No Thanks, Telcos Say To Govt’s Aadhaar KYC Amendments . xxx

Was it Andy Warhol who once said “if you try to pay with a $100 bill, they call the manager”? (Yes, ed.) However, the touch screens include a button that allows customers to call a manager to accept cash payments, he said. From Does Going Cashless Hurt Financial Inclusion? . xxx

xxx Although Amazon’s Prime members would qualify for exemptions on the grounds that payment works on a membership model, Amazon has said that its Amazon Go stores would cater to other customers as well. From Does Going Cashless Hurt Financial Inclusion? . xxx

xxx The Horn of Africa state has not issued official currency notes since 1991 and is banking on a $41 million donor-funded currency reform plan to phase out the counterfeit notes that account for more than 90 percent of the money in circulation in the country. From Somalia seeks Nairobi expert in fake money purge - The East African . xxx

For me, SXSW19 began with an interesting panel on the business models Naturally, the conversation drifted toward policy and Elizabeth Warren’s recent remarks While I agree wholly with the need to protect competition, and therefore capitalism, I do not think that breaking companies up is the way forward Cindy Cohn said (correctly) that current anti-trust law is not suited to the demands of the digital age. Hence I asked the panel about the alternative Don’t break them up, open them up.

One of the reasons why I love South by Southwest (or SXSW as we cool kids call it) is the serendipity. There’s so much going on at any one time that if you find your self in a talk that’s not that interesting or not that useful, you can just wander next door into something else. This was how come I found myself listening to a discussion about technology and populism with Samantha Dravis from Clout Public Affairs , Daniel Lippman from Politico , Robby Mook from the Belfer Center and Alex Slater from the Clyde Group . The general thrust of the conversation It’s my current fascination with authenticity and the link between digital identity and fake people, fake news and fake organisations that 

xxx Babak, my nearest bicycle repairman, recently started taking Swish after tiring of having to find creative ways get around the 10,000 kronor weekly limit on depositing cash into machines. From Sweden: how cash became more trouble than it’s worth | Money | The Guardian . xxx

xxx Analysis of accounts interconnected into a “Meghan Markle” Twitter community found around 1,000 “highly-connected” accounts which have tweeted more than two and half million times since September. From 'Megbot' army linked to Russian conspiracy theories tweeting 'obsessive' support for Duchess, says report . xxx

In the UK, a new report funded by the people who run ATMs is even more dramatic. BBC News reports it as saying that the system allowing people to use cash is at risk of "falling apart" and needs a new guarantee to ensure notes and coins can still be used.

xxx Amazon.com Inc. is gearing up to challenge Apple Inc. in the mobile-payments race. The e-commerce giant is working to persuade brick-and-mortar stores to accept its Amazon Pay digital wallet. From Amazon Pay Accepted Here? Web Giant Aims to Put Digital Wallet in Stores - WSJ . xxx

xxx In 2015, GDS’s intention was to fund Verify through income generated by charging departments for using the system. The aim was to charge £1.20 per year, per user. GDS estimated that by 2018, this would generate £19m per year, but due to the low take-up of the system, only £1.3m was brought in during 2017-18. The average price GDS pays to private sector identity providers for each new user is £20. From GDS cut expected benefits of troubled Gov.uk Verify system by 75% . xxx

As the Bank of England themselves put it, “ legal tender has a narrow technical meaning which has no use in everyday life ”. Quite.

The US is behind some other parts of the world, perhaps, but it is trending in the same direction. According to recent research , almost a third of American adults use no cash at all for their weekly purchases (it was a quarter back in 2015). Conversely, a fifth of Americans says that make nearly all of their purchases in cash. Against this backdrop, it is no surprise that some retailers, in some locations, are starting to go cash free. Now, as far as I am concerned, that’s up to them. Writing in the CATO Journal last year — " Special Interest Politics Could Save Cash or Kill It " CATO Journal 38(2): 489-502 (Spring 2018) — Norbert Michel said “it seems risky, at best, to give the government so much control over the form of payment citizens choose, but that is exactly what many policymakers are hoping to do”. He was talking about laws to ban cash, but the argument applies both ways. Should regulators care whether a retailer is cashless or not and, if they do care, what should...

The well-known commentator Seth Godin said on his blog ( 3rd March 2019 ) that bots should announce "I’m not a person, or if I am, I’m not allowed to act like one” which is a fair point but how would I know whether to believe it or not? Unless there is a digital identity infrastructure in place

Richard Brown, the CTO of R3 and someone who definitely knows what he is talking about, has some pretty harsh words to say about Ethereum as a platform for Enterprise Shared Ledger (ESL) applications. And yet consultants, some from reputable firms, are pushing this technology hard in to organisations that don’t always possess the technical expertise to realise the advice may not be appropriate. From Busting the Myth of Public Blockchains for Business | Richard Gendal Brown . xxx

xxx They compromise financial privacy and enable the prosecution of victimless crimes wherever banks are required to “know their customers” and to provide transaction records to government officials. From The Curse of the War on Cash | Cato Institute . Now, I am somewhat sympathetic to Larry’s view here but I wonder if national regulators would be happy with the categorisation of KYC as 

As Larry White, someone who I always take very seriously in any such discussion, says in the Cato Journal  “Some other writers and officials… do seek a cashless society. They want to drive all transactions into forms that leave an audit trail for the law enforcement and tax authorities”. I think I’m probably in this category. While I appreciate the arguments of Larry and others about anonymity, I do not agree with them. This is because I do not see that the only two options as being anonymous physical cash or unconditionally traceable digital money. We have a wide variety of tools available to us to construct the next generation of digital money and  As Larry notes in one of his examples , the Swiss National Bank is "the most important central bank still bucking the trend". It has said that it has no plans to withdraw its 1,000 Swiss Franc note. But what are these notes used for? I read the Swiss National Bank’s payment survey for 2017, the most recent available, and it repo...

xxx That means that if the US is as law-abiding as, say, Norway, then there’s about $200 billion of cash in the US that is only used for tax evasion, crime, money laundering and so on. From Cash means a lot of baggage | Consult Hyperion . xxx xxx "Generally, economists believe the surge is related to people around the world wanting to hoard cash, a similar force that’s driven the interest in cryptocurrencies. High denomination, high value currency notes have historically been a preferred form of payment for criminals, given the anonymity, lack of transaction record and relative ease with which they can be brought across borders." From "Surge in $100 bills in circulation may be linked to global corruption" .   xxx

A couple of generations on, and the New York Times reports ( "Russian General Pitches ‘Information’ Operations as a Form of War", 2nd March 2019 ) that the chief of Russia’s armed forces, General Valery V. Gerasimov, gave a speech at a conference on the future of Russian military strategy recapitulating a journal article he wrote in 2013 saying that there are no clear borders between war and peace in the modern world. xxx

In fact, Amazon already has a service to allow customers to pay with cash. The e-commerce giant has rolled out a service that will allow customers to purchase goods and then pay for them at a local Western Union retail agent. During checkout, a special QR code will be generated that will be used to verify the customer’s identity and matched to the order confirmation for payment. Dubbed Amazon PayCode, the cross-border payment option has been launched in Kenya in Africa, along with nine other countries in Asia and Latin America. From Amazon targets Africans who would rather pay with cash | CGTN Africa . xxx

xxx The movements in cash in circulation around the time of cannabis legalisation would seem to provide early evidence to suggest that Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau’s policy has already been successful in crimping the black economy. The fall in currency in circulation of C$1.2 billion in October was broadly in line with Statistics Canada’s estimate of likely legal spending on cannabis by consumers in 4Q. From Legalising cannabis reduced the use of cash in Canada | LSE Business Review . xxx

xxx If people are ever going to start using privacy-friendly payments options, then product designers will have to ensure that privacy is seamlessly integrated into the payments process. Making anonymity the default option would be a big step. From JP Koning: People Don't Care About Financial Privacy As Much As You Think . We need to do this not because people want it but because it’s the right thing to do for society. You don’t give people the choice to wear seat belts or not. But it isn’t about anonymity, because that’s not best for society either. It’s about pseudonymity.

xxx "Customers will still have to have taken appropriate steps to make sure the person they paid was not a scammer, but if they have taken reasonable care, then they will now be much more likely to be reimbursed" From "Payment scam victims more likely to be reimbursed - BBC News" . xxx

Around a decade ago my son was, as is rather the fashion with teenagers, in a band. With some friends of his, he arranged a “gig” (as I believe they are called) at a local venue. There were five bands involved and the paying public arrived in droves, ensuring a good time was had by all. All of this was arranged through Facebook. All of the organisation and all of the coordination was efficient and effective so that the youngsters were able to self-organise in an impressive way. Everything worked perfectly. Except the payments. When it came to reckoning up the gig wonga (as my old friend Paul Pike of Intelligent Venues would call it), we we had a couple of weeks worth of “can you send PayPal to Simon’s dad” and “he gave me a cheque what I do with it?” and “Andy paid me in cash but I need to send it to Steve“ and so on. Some of them had bank accounts, some of them didn’t. Some of them had bank accounts that you could use online and others didn’t. Some of them had mobile payments of one...