Author Archives: David Birch

Around 40% of UK adults have poor financial literacy making them £20,000 worse off compared to those with good financial literacy. A 2024 index using the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Centre’s “Big Three” questions (about interest, inflation, risk) found that a fifth of UK adults could not correctly answer any of the three, and anotherContinue reading “Nearly 24mn UK adults have poor financial literacy – FTAdviser”

I was listening to an interesting discussion between Nick Lambert of Dock Labs and Marie Austenaa, then the Payment Domain Lead for the EUDI Large Scale Pilots and Head of Digital Identity at Visa. These are both people I take very seriously when it comes to digtial identity and I was not disapponted by theContinue reading “POST EUDIW “Cookie Fatigue””

xxx The key findings of the Federal Reserve Payments Study (FRPS) for 2025, releaased in July 2026, are that … From: The Fed – National Payment Volumes, Top-Line Data (CY 2015-24). xxx

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 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”