Snippings

Figures just released by the UK’s Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) put authorised push payment (APP) fraud losses at £258 million in the year to September 2025 with 88% (£173m) of the money lost being reimbursed to victims.

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There were some pockets of fintech innovation (lending to the underbanked, SMEs, and corporate credit cards), but banks managed to hold their ground in the segments they care about. Could disruption in lending finally come from agentic commerce? Credit card issuers built defensible moats through decades of investment in brand loyalty. An AI agent has no loyalty.

From: Signal: Can Fintechs Out-AI Banks?.

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A lot of science-fiction is dystopian in nature because, as Alfred North Whitehead so sagely Road, it is the business of the future to be dangerous. Hence whether it’s George Orwell 1984 or the terminator it is an overbearing government or tyrannical corporation that is behind the moves to en

As things have turned though, the government isn’t very good at huge IT schemes. It doesn’t matter though, the government didn’t need to make big brother because we all started spying on each other anyway. 

 

(As it happens, there is already a global messageboard where bots spew scams, nonsense and the regurgitated propaganda on interests group that would be marginalised in a sane society but can undermine democracy through co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour. It’s called “X”.)

So what is actually going on over at Moltbook? Well, a few days in and the “leaderboard” they have here is already largely given over to cryptoscams of one form or another with the occassional bot swarm coming up the ranks.

You know what I am going to say here, of course: without digital identity, verifiable credentials and immutable reputation, the bots cannot do anything useful.

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Make a simple rule: they never move money or share codes and passwords based on a phone call, text, email, or social message without first checking with a trusted family member. Younger family “intervention” like this is shown to reduce losses.

From: older people are very susceptible to fraud! what are telecom and social media….

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Bermuda has unveiled plans to migrate its entire national economy to an on-chain digital asset infrastructure, announcing them at this monthʼs World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting in Davos. 
The country — which relies on technology supplied by payments infrastructure provider Circle and cryptocurrency platform Coinbase — aims to migrate its government, local banks, insurers, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and consumers to the new on-chain infrastructure. This would allow digital assets to be used in everyday financial transactions. 
The island nation hopes the US dollar-based digital assets will offer fast, low-cost payments; enable people to transact locally; support economic activity; and meet compliance obligations.

From: Lessons from the history of hyper-local currencies – Compliance Corylated.

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In the US, e-commerce is something like a fifth of retail sales and analysts predict that AI will account for someting in the region of a tenth of e-commrce sales three years from now, so AI will influence around $150 billion of consumer purchases.

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If the shoppers are chatbots and not humans, will they be swayed by adverts, or trained to ignore them?

From: How shopping chatbots might transform retail.

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According to data from analytics firm Similarweb, Walmart’s efforts have helped to double its share of referrals from AI, measured against a sample of major retailers and marketplaces, to 32.5 per cent over the course of 2025.

From: How shopping chatbots might transform retail.

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Yet the advent of agentic AI also threatens to start unpicking an online retail ecosystem that has cost billions of dollars of investment to create. Control over customer relationships and data troves that have been built up over decades could be partially ceded to intermediaries.

From: How shopping chatbots might transform retail.

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A record $158bn of digital tokens was sent to crypto wallets controlled by criminals last year, underscoring how the fast-growing digital assets industry is increasingly being used to facilitate illicit activity globally.

From: Illicit crypto flows surge to record $158bn.

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