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AI significantly enhances personalized budgeting by leveraging data on an individual’s spending patterns and income streams. Traditional budgeting methods often rely on generalized rules and static guidelines, which may not adequately reflect the unique financial situation of everyone. In contrast, AI employs dynamic algorithms that continuously analyze a user’s financial behavior to provide tailored budgeting advice.[1] By integrating ML techniques, AI platforms can automate best practices and adjust recommendations based on real-time financial data.[2]
This personalized approach is crucial for effective financial planning, as it allows AI to balance mathematical optimization with practical applicability. For instance, AI can create budgets that account for irregular income or unexpected expenses, offering solutions that are both realistic and actionable.[3] Furthermore, AI’s ability to set up automatic savings plans based on its analysis enables users to consistently allocate funds toward specific financial goals, such as saving for a down payment on a house or preparing for retirement.[4] This comprehensive approach not only optimizes budget allocations but also provides users with adaptive financial advice, making personal finance management more effective and user-friendly.[5]

From: TRENDS Research & Advisory – Smart Finance: How AI is Shaping the Future of Budgeting and Investing.

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Visa’s research19 showed consumers already show interest in financial planning tools, including savings pots and similar devices. 31% of UK consumers are aware of savings management (e.g. setting up and managing savings pots) tools and would like to use them. 38% of Brits agree they would like to learn more about managing their finances and how they can optimise them20.

Tools like these could move consumers closer to recommended savings levels. Experts suggest that individuals save in a ratio of 50/30/20 of their disposable income allocated between must-have needs, wants, and savings. Currently, the savings rate in the UK is closer to 10% rather than 20%, with a non-trivial portion of households with limited or no savings. The EU is similar at 12.7% in 2022, close to its pre-pandemic average21.

Tools like savings pots and new banking models are unlikely to close the gap completely. However, if these devices can help increase consumer savings by an additional 1% of consumer disposable income (one-tenth to one-eight of the current gap), total consumer savings over the EU plus UK could increase by approximately 130-250 billion Euros annually22. This is a conservative estimate from Morning Consult, as the full gap is 7% or more.

From: The Future is Here: The methodologies behind Visa’s economic scenarios of the future | Visa Navigate.

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our in-game research revealed an X-rated pedophile hellscape, exposing children to grooming, pornography, violent content and extremely abusive speech.

From: Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids – Hindenburg Research.

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But DAUs, according to Roblox’s own disclosures, “are not a measure of unique individuals accessing Roblox” because they can include numerous accounts run by a single person, such as alternate or bot accounts.

From: Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids – Hindenburg Research.

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The detectives outlined how the two accused were unemployed but there was just more than €7 million in their accounts. Gardaí identified €14.7 million in cryptocurrency wallets, of which €4.4 million has been seized or frozen by the investigation team.

Their apartment was searched – resulting in an alleged seizure of €20,000, gold coins and five envelopes with “seed words” to access a cryptocurrency wallet.

From: Married couple charged over alleged €21m international money laundering operation – The Irish Times.

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For Amazon customers, identity proofing is not a requirement. “We don’t know the underlying human,” Paul Grassi of Amazon says. “That’s not a bad thing.” He describes Amazon’s protections against account takeovers as “very stringent.”
In the case of vendors, or consumers purchasing age restricted goods, however, the company must verify their identity or age.

From: Amazon is ready to use digital identity, even though its hard | Biometric Update.

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Amazon currently uses “the simple demographic check” and ID document and selfie biometrics checks, “which we’re starting to hate as well from a usability perspective and a security perspective,” among its current measures, Grassi says. The ecommerce giant is planning to start accepting digital IDs like mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) and European national IDs presented from mobile wallets in 2025, he revealed. Federated identity based on Aadhaar will also be added.

We tend to think about the use of AI in financial services as a way to deliver products and services, or (as I am constsntly insisting) a way to make customers 100x smarter.

 

Maria Lucia Passador — Department of Law, Bocconi University; Harvard Law School and European Banking Institute — wrote a paper about this called “AI in the Vault: AI Act’s Impact on Financial Regulation” in which she advances the view that AI haas the potential to improve banking supervision by enhancing the efficiency, effectiveness and consistency of practices and tools. Across a rapdily evolving financial landscape, AI can overcome some of the challenges to, and constraints of, the existing supervisory framework by streamlining processes such as data collection, analysis, and reporting. Furthermore, AI can enhance the effectiveness of supervision by improving the quality of risk assessment and monitoring helping to proactively detect (and, hopefully, prevent) risks and misconduct.

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Eric Schmidt says drones are the future of warfare, calling tanks “useless.”

From: Ex-Google CEO Says AI Combat Drones Will Make Tanks ‘Useless’ in War – Business Insider.

I said that tanks were useless (on the Jeremy Vine show, as it happened) and whatever. Now because Eric Schmidt says it, it’s news. So unfair.

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Overall, current drones seem to increase the vulnerability of fixed assets such as tanks or troop formations, or for that matter oil refineries or Moscow or Ukraine fixed landmarks.  A very large and sophisticated U.S. aircraft carrier might be able to repel the drones (albeit at high dollar cost), but a bunch of tanks in an open field will not have comparable protection.

From: Do current trends in drone technology favor offense or defense? – Marginal REVOLUTION.

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Data from the battlefield suggest that the hit rate for these ai-guided drones is currently above 80%. That is higher than the rate of manually piloted drones.

From: How Ukraine uses cheap AI-guided drones to deadly effect against Russia.

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Clients will not immediately abandon their existing counsel in favor of those at a law firm that introduces a dashboard for matter management. Incumbency has benefits. The cost of switching lawyers is significant and not worth incurring for marginal improvements in the user of experience. But I know, deeply, that product matters. At some point, marginal improvements add up, and markets flip.

From: The Future of Legal Services Is Product | by Tom Brown | Sep, 2024 | Medium.

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A digital identity is a digital representation of a person or things about them. It lets people prove these things without presenting physical documents and all of the information they contain.

From: Data (Use and Access) Bill factsheet: making lives easier – GOV.UK.

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