Author Archives: David Birch

The FCA’s new stablecoin regime tries to make tokens look less like casino chips and more like regulated plumbing, especially on market conduct, while positioning the UK somewhere between MiCA’s heavy armour and the US’s fragmented patchwork, with an eye on future UK digital ID and AML infrastructures. What follows leans into three themes: marketContinue reading “DRAFT Stablecoins and Stability”

xxx The Trump family’s media group is asking large trading firms to pay for ultrafast access to the US president’s often market-moving posts on Truth Social. Trump Media & Technology Group on Thursday announced the launch of a new data feed called Truth API that it said would provide “real-time access to posts from theContinue reading “Trump Media to sell high-speed access to president’s social media posts”

xxx Shopify’s Q1 data shows AI usage is changing the funnel of commerce incredibly quickly (covered previously on brainfood here) AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores grew 8x year on year. Orders from AI-powered searches grew almost 13x. Vanessa Lee, Shopify’s VP of Product, says AI commerce is growing nine times faster than social did atContinue reading “🧠 Finance Agents & the Optimization Economy | Brainfood”

xxx Currently in beta testing, the Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP) gives firms a simple way to access, store, and redeem stablecoins, beginning with Open USD (OUSD). This includes onchain wallet infrastructure through a newly introduced Wallet-as-a-Service offering and connectivity for minting and burning Open USD. Firms can onboard into a Visa-managed wallet stack or connectContinue reading “Visa launches stablecoin platform”

Dr Hany Farid told the ACFE Global Fraud Conference that people are remarkably poor at identifying AI-generated content. When people were shown a mix of genuine and AI-generated images, audio clips and videos, they performed only slightly better than random chance at distinguishing the real from the fake.

xxx Visa on Tuesday launched AI Financial Assistant, which the card network says brings “conversational financial guidance” into banking apps. Visa hopes its massive payment network generates enough data to keep card issuers—and consumers—from using third-party AI programs to guide budgeting and other spending decisions. From: Visa debuts AI financial advice feature | American Banker.Continue reading “Visa debuts AI financial advice feature | American Banker”

xxx Russia, Iran and North Korea are increasingly relying on cryptocurrencies to keep money moving despite sweeping Western sanctions, with sanctioned entities and networks conducting an estimated $104 billion (around Rs 9.92 lakh crore) worth of crypto transactions in 2025, according to a new report by blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. The findings highlight how digitalContinue reading “Russia, Iran, North Korea moved $104 billion in crypto to bypass sanctions – India Today”

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 another quarter could only answer one.

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””