Author Archives: David Birch

xxx Safaricom Ethiopia will lead the rollout of Ethiopia’s national digital identity registration across seven regions under a new partnership with the National ID Program and Africom Technologies. • The agreement covers Lots 3 and 4 of the National Fayda Digital ID Registration Project and assigns the consortium responsibility for enrolling residents in Afar, Amhara,Continue reading “Safaricom Ethiopia Wins Role in National Digital ID Rollout | The Kenyan Wallstreet”

xxx The European Central bank says it has restored normal operations of its real-time gross settlement system T2 after reporting the second incident in a week, affecting settlement of euros and Danish krone. From: ECB’s T2 suffers second ‘incident’ as Euronext reports outage – Central Banking. xxx

xxx The scale of the issue is further underscored in analysis in Revolut’s Clicking with Caution report. It finds that 13.5 million British consumers have been left out of pocket after being scammed, while 19 million have reduced their online spending as a direct consequence. What emerges is not just a fraud problem, but whatContinue reading “APP fraud back on the rise as £1.3bn stolen”

xxx DPI unlocks growth through three core mechanisms: eliminating the friction tax, enabling public and private innovation and treating data as productive capital. The UK’s current ‘tenant state’ model, characterised by vendor lock-in and a sovereignty gap, is actively stalling these drivers of growth. Transitioning from a digital tenant to a sovereign owner of theseContinue reading “Liberating the tenant state: why digital public infrastructure is critical for growth | Nesta”

xxx Xiaowei is Tencent’s AI-native digital assistant built directly into WeChat, allowing users to converse naturally with artificial intelligence that can answer questions, organise tasks, access services and increasingly complete transactions across the entire WeChat ecosystem. It isn’t being plugged into a standalone payment wallet; it is being embedded into one of the richest commerce,Continue reading “WeChat opens the door to the agentic financial future – Chris Skinner’s blog”

xxx Europe’s top banking watchdogs have warned that frontier AI models such as Anthropic’s Mythos could create “systemic risks to the financial system” as they gave lenders a tight four-month deadline to prepare for greater cyber security threats. The European Central Bank’s chief financial supervisor Claudia Buch on Tuesday sent a letter to 110 lendersContinue reading “Top banking watchdogs issue stark warning over AI-driven cyber attacks”

xxx The Oura ring is not a fitness tracker in this context. It is the data source that makes a recurring, provider-led commerce relationship possible. The wearable becomes the credential that unlocks the service layer. I was talking to a VC recently who raised the logical extension of this: what happens when you embed aContinue reading “Ilona III: The Missing Layer in Live Event Payments”

xxx This week, the situation hit a boiling point when the song “Earrings” by Malcolm Todd surged to number one on a Spotify chart. In a series of X posts, Davies outlined his suspected culprit: “botting,” or scammers who purchase bots to juice streaming numbers. Davies argued that prediction market traders were botting the chartsContinue reading “Spotify Confirms Streaming Fraud After Kalshi Trader Cries Foul | WIRED”

xxx Banks keep investing in this segment (and nonbanks like Robinhood and Bilt are entering it) because premium cards are highly effective tools for customer acquisition against which you can gather deposits, originate mortgages, and cross-sell trading and wealth management services. The lifetime economics of these adjacent products dwarf the card itself. From: The IllusionContinue reading “The Illusion of Premium Card Profitability | Flagship Advisory Partners”

xxx The launch of Open USD is structurally intertwined with the federal GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act). I’ve written extensively about how the GENIUS Act reshapes stablecoin compliance—”We are effectively creating a pathway for the dollar to become the native currency of the internet.” Open USD was designed fromContinue reading “Open USD – Stablecoin’s New Gold Standard for Trust, Compliance, Governance and Economics | Noyes Payments Blog”