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Deutsche Bank subsidiary Postbank is preparing to roll out a service that enables consumers to generate a barcode on their phone to withdraw or deposit around €1,000 per day at 12,500 retail locations in Germany

From: Postbank generates cash via barcode.

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Deena Bishop, commissioner of the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development, had to write a policy to limit the use of cell phones in classrooms. She decided to use generatiive AI with the almost inevitable result, given the propensity of the technology to “hallucinate”, that she ended up citing six scientific studies that did not actually exist.

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The Treasury estimates that $120 billion worth of T-bills have been purchased to serve as yield-bearing stablecoin collateral. The majority of that sum—nearly $81 billion—has been purchased by Tether, the company behind the crypto market’s largest stablecoin, USDT.

From: US Treasury Says Stablecoins Should Be Replaced by a CBDC – Decrypt.

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The U.S. Treasury Department is concerned about the growth of the stablecoin market and believes privately issued stablecoins should eventually be replaced by a state-backed central bank digital currency (CBDC), according to a Treasury report released Wednesday.

From: US Treasury Says Stablecoins Should Be Replaced by a CBDC – Decrypt.

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Cambodia’s Project Bakong, which surpassed 10 million accounts (60% of Cambodia’s population) in December 2023. The National Bank of Cambodia (NBC) jointly developed Bakong with the Japanese blockchain technology startup Soramitsu, launching it in October 2020.

Digital currency experts often point out that Bakong is technically not a CBDC, and that is true. It is more of a tokenized deposit system since the digital currency is a liability of commercial banks. When users pay each other, an end-of-day settlement between banks occurs.

From: Why a retail digital currency is working in Cambodia – Kapronasia.

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In traiditonal finance, different kinds of assets have different rules applied to them, and they are all different. A bond has different rules from an equity which has different rules from a swap which has different rules from property and so on. One of the key advantages of a market based on tokens is that there is only one kind of digital asset and that they have a defined set of rules that can be coded into “smart” “contracts” (ie, persistent scripts capable of executing transactions using those assets).

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As one of the world’s most successful payments companies, they’ve mastered the art of deploying and monetizing a streamlined software layer on top of global money movement—a model that scales efficiently through network effects without being slowed down by the need for country-specific banking licenses. Stablecoins accelerate this approach by acting as a bridge between Stripe and domestic banking and payment rails. What was once a network constrained by legacy institutions—including card companies—can now overcome its last-mile problem, delivering significantly more value to merchants and consumers.

From: Why Everyone’s Wrong About Stablecoins.

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Sadly, much of the marketing that advisers use to earn investors’ trust is misleading, including TV appearances they didn’t make, books they didn’t write and standards of ethics they don’t meet. I call this “trustwashing.”

From: Financial Guru, TV Star, Bestselling Author? Not So Fast – WSJ.

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Who does the digital assistant belong to?

Is it Personal, like a car – belonging to you? Or is it Personalised, like a taxi – not belonging to you, but rather something you borrow, use or rent.

From: Why is nobody asking these Big Five Questions about ‘Agent AI’?.

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While most uses of AI in financial services were “fairly low risk from a financial stability standpoint . . . more significant use cases from a financial stability perspective are emerging”, such as assessing credit risk and algorithmic trading.

Bank of England deputy governor Sarah Breeden said half of the uses of AI by financial companies were split roughly evenly between “semi-autonomous decision-making”, with some human involvement, and completely automated processes with no human involvement.

From: Banks’ use of AI could be included in stress tests, says Bank of England deputy governor.

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