A library of snippets
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But with timing being everything, the final concrete block standing in the way of that RCS train might be Apple’s imminent iPhone update—iOS 18.2. Much to everyone’s surprise, the iMaker has decided to offer all its users—not just those in regulated Europe–the option to change their default apps. That means selecting an over-the-tops like WhatsApp or Signal for default calls and messages for the first time.
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For the sellers of goods, successfully operating in this agentic shopping future will require implementation of new technology, new capabilities and new infrastructure. Just as the emergence of the ecommerce and mobile shopping eras were daunting for sellers, the agentic shopping era will be similarly disruptive – likely establishing brand new winners and losers, elevating some who are on the front-end of these changes while demoting others who lag behind
From: The Dawn of the Agentic Commerce Era – Putting Gen AI to Work for Shoppers | Bain Capital Ventures.
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“The CFPB is now backpedaling, realizing that 1033 will make Google and other tech titans more powerful — another not well-thought-through unintended consequence of the CFPB’s earlier actions — making the bureau even more vulnerable to the new administration’s mandates for curbing its power,” says Crone.
From: Will Bankerly Supervision Come to Big Tech’s Digital Wallets?.
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U.S. companies and marketplaces pay their foreign workers or vendors in cash sent to their virtual U.S. bank accounts, where the startups then convert the funds into stablecoins. Airtm uses this process for payouts made to sellers from Amazon and to hosts from Airbnb, as well as for money sent through PayPal, according to the company.
From: Stablecoin Startups Seek Fresh Cash Amid Crypto Payments Frenzy — The Information.
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With its purchase of MoneyLion, Gen aims to extend its identity solutions to offer “comprehensive financial wellness”, leveraging MoneyLion’s personal finance platform which features money management and credit-building services.
From: Cybersecurity specialist Gen Digital acquires MoneyLion in $1bn deal – FinTech Futures: Fintech news.
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In 2022, just 20 percent of in-person GP card payments were contactless, using either a card or a mobile device (14 percent by value), as illustrated in the charts below.
The other 80 percent were mostly inserted chip card payments (68 percent of the total) and some remaining no-chip payments (around 12 percent).
From: Contactless Pay: Still Not the Norm – Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
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But I guess when you’re a humanities graduate, like most of the Lobby presumably are,8 and most of your job involves understanding human relationships and status games, it of course makes questions about institutional design and corporate strategy harder to grasp. The same goes for questions about epidemiological data, or indeed the technical points of digital identity systems.
From: (2) We need more than Westminster reporters to understand government.
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El Salvador expects to reach agreement with the IMF in the next two to three weeks on a $1.3bn loan programme in return for changes to its pioneering use of bitcoin as legal tender and reductions in government deficits, according to two people close to the talks.
From: El Salvador to scale back bitcoin dreams to seal $1.3bn IMF deal.
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Gold reserves, on the other hand, no longer serve to settle international accounts. Yet they make up roughly 15 percent of global reserve assets. The main reason for this is that gold is a good hedge against exchange-rate or “currency” risk, meaning the risk monetary authorities incur by holding reserves of foreign exchange. But as we’ll see, a big chunk of the world’s official gold reserves is held for no better reason than sheer inertia.
From: The “Digital Gold” Fallacy, or, Why Bitcoin Can’t Save the U.S. Dollar.
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Animals get their own bank accounts
What if animals had their own pots of money, and could spend it in ways to promote conservation and biodiversity, increasing their chances of survival? That is the idea behind “interspecies money”, a concept being developed by Tehanu, a technology outfit. It has already launched a trial involving a family of 19 mountain gorillas in Rwanda, and in 2025 it hopes to extend this scheme to cover all gorillas in the country. In the coming year it also hopes to launch a separate project to help protect the straw-coloured fruit bat, which is found across central Africa and plays a valuable role in seed dispersal.illustration: leon edler
Tehanu’s system uses sensors and artificial intelligence to determine the needs of the animals—for example, that a poacher’s snare needs to be removed, or that an individual gorilla requires veterinary treatment. It then recruits a nearby human to do this work, via an online services platform that the company calls “the gig economy for nature”, and issues a payment once it is complete. In this way, animals can direct their funds to local workers in accordance with their needs and those of the ecosystem they inhabit. Tehanu’s aim is to show that distributing conservation funding in this way is transparent, produces verifiable results and creates sustainable jobs—as well as protecting the animals, their habitats and the ecosystem services they provide. Humans can make digital payments verified by facial recognition, so why shouldn’t gorillas?
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Snippings