Snippings

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Unlike with cards, there’s no single, centralized way to confirm an account is open, active and owned by the person or business getting paid. And, unlike the United Kingdom or European Union, the U.S. has no all-encompassing regulations requiring banks to employ strict verification.

From: How real-time pay is pressuring bank authentication | American Banker.

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In the US, fewer than a third of financial institutions have automated review of payments sent or received for money laundering, most reviews are still done manually when an account is opened.

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But A.I. is also creating a new type of work that may be sucking up much of the time the technology itself is saving.

Call it a “verification tax,” “botsitting” or “rework” — it’s the often arduous task of checking that A.I. output is accurate, safe and usable, and it is putting a very human bottleneck on A.I. automation.

From: What’s Dragging Down A.I. Efficiency? The ‘Verification Tax.’ – The New York Times.

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At least three user accounts at the Funen-based IT company Pays used the password “123456” when hackers gained access to Denmark’s CPR register, Politiken reports.
One of them was the company’s administrator account.
The breach exposed information linked to around 8.8 million CPR numbers. The CPR system is Denmark’s central civil registration database and contains personal information on people living or previously registered in Denmark.

From: `123456’ password used in massive Danish CPR data breach – The Copenhagen Post.

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KYA might help build a common trust layer for agent identity. But sooner or later, we’ll need the same kind of interoperability for disputes.

From: Knowing Your Agent Won’t Solve the Chargeback Problem.

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But merchants need to look further down the road. As agentic volume grows, the evidence that matters will get a lot more granular:

What agent initiated the purchase?
What authority did it present?
Did the merchant recognize or permit that agent?
What information did the merchant provide to the agent?
What terms were available when the agent made its decision?
Were important restrictions communicated in machine-readable form?
Did the consumer establish spending, product, timing, refundability, or other parameters?
Can any of those facts be retrieved later?
And perhaps most importantly, which participant is responsible for preserving them?

From: Knowing Your Agent Won’t Solve the Chargeback Problem.

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The Muse app quickly became — and remains — the most downloaded on both the Apple and Android app stores in the US. The $1.8tn company intends to integrate its new model into Muse.

Meta said Muse Wonder outperforms Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra on some technical benchmarks. It said the new model can be used to carry out complex tasks from “understanding a lease to making sense of financial or health information”

From: Mark Zuckerberg says Meta has reached AI ‘frontier’.

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Mastercard is now also taking action, stating that from February 2027 all newly issued cards across Europe will be enabled to make offline payments. By May 2027, all new and replacement payment terminals will also be required to support them.

Once the requirements are implemented across Europe, people will be able to use chip and PIN during an outage to pay for essentials at supermarkets, grocery stores, service stations and pharmacies, as well as at travel and ticket machines.

The online payments work by securely storing spending limits on a card’s chip. If a terminal loses its connection, the transaction can be approved locally, up to a limit of €200 set in advance by the cardholder’s bank. It is then submitted for clearing when the connection is restored.

The European rollout comes after successful implementation in Denmark, Sweden, Estonia and Latvia.

From: Mastercard to enable offline payments across Europe.

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Japan’s financial services regulator has warned banks not to accept driving licences as proof of identity to open new accounts as the country reels from a series of cyber attacks that have hit rail operators, car manufacturers, karaoke chains and even the police.

The spiralling crisis prompted the ruling Liberal Democratic Party to convene an emergency meeting of the National Cybersecurity Strategy Headquarters on Friday, following reports of hacks at dozens of the country’s leading brands from car rental operator Times Car to convenience store chain Lawson as well as hospitals and other government facilities.

More than 20 major companies from barbecue chains to discounters have reported cyber attacks in recent weeks, warning that tens of millions of pieces of customer data may have been leaked.

The increasing frequency of the attacks has prompted alarm at the highest levels of the Japanese government. Masaaki Taira, head of the NCSH, declared that Japan was in “a state of emergency in cyber space”. Japanese cyber security minister Toshiharu Furukawa said the situation was “extremely critical”.

From: Japan declares cyber space emergency as attacks soar.

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His last big technological wager—making El Salvador the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender, in 2021—fizzled. Ordinary people found no use for it. Mr Bukele treated it as a personal project, memorably saying he bought it from the bathroom. No one knows what becomes of the country’s stash if and when he leaves power.

From: The dictator’s laboratory: Nayib Bukele is pushing AI hard.

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I was watching a recent video of a conversation between two of the industry observers that I always pay attention to: Noelle Acheson and Marieke Flament. I subscribe to both of their substacks and always take their comments very seriously. Apart from very jealous of their ability to wear such a depth of knowledge so lightly, I found myself engrossed in their discussion about EU stablecoin evolution and, more specifically, what a modern “money stack” should look like.

Marieke made the point that (and I am paraphrasing here) wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC)  is a basic and uncontroversial platform for the next generation of financial services.

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I reckon I am asked more than once a month on average to go through such a process, providing utility bills etc. I am 68 and have lived at the same address for 30+ years.

From: Britain has turned digital ID into a growth industry.

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