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That seems to be the hot topic of the day, as agentic businesses continue to promise a world of integrations, where AI is deputized to make financial decisions on behalf of users. Want to earn rewards on a purchase? Let your agent decide on the best payment method. Need to cancel or change a subscription? Your agent can do that for you. Miss a bill payment? Your agent will catch it and make sure you’re current.
But with new payment methods come new fraud vectors, and it’s unclear where liability will sit for disputed transactions. If you didn’t mean to pay for something, is that the agent’s responsibility, the merchant’s, your bank’s, or yours? Can someone trick your agent into making fraudulent purchases, and if they do, who is on the hook?
There are also authorization questions to answer: How can agents sit in fraud auth flows like liveness verification, device 2FA, pin number entry, etc.? And if they’re able to do so easily – how can payments providers quickly improve their auth flows to prevent AI payment spamming? (Incidentally, one of our newest investments from the fund, BKey, is looking to prevent just that.)

From: Would you let an AI agent make payments for you? (TWIF 11/29).

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Ian Mccrae, director of market intelligence at Ofcom, who says “platforms need to do much, much more to know the age of their children online.” Ofcom intends to ensure that happens, as it moves to enforce the Online Safety Act (OSA). McCrae says firms that do not comply could face fines of up to 10 percent of their global revenue.
For context, the annual revenue of huge porn streaming site Pornhub is estimated to be up to $97 billion.

From: Kids are bypassing weak age assurance measure in droves, and it has to change: Ofcom | Biometric Update.

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A new Ofcom survey shows that 22 percent of eight-to-17 year olds lie that they are 18 or over on social media apps, easily bypassing flaccid self-declaring age assurance methods.

From: Kids are bypassing weak age assurance measure in droves, and it has to change: Ofcom | Biometric Update.

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People, as is often observed, do not change their primary bank that often. Kearney’s data from its annual European Retail Banking Radar shows that more than two-thirds (73%) of European bank clients have kept their primary account at the same institution for five years or longer. Over half of all Europeans (55%) still bank with only one institution and only one in five (19%) respondents who had changed their primary banking relationship in the previous five years had switched to a “challenger’ (ie, a digital bank or a fintech). The fact is that customer loyalty (or, frankly, customer inertia) benefits banks greatly. and helps them to fight off competition.

Interestingly, within Europe, it is UK consumers who appear the most fickle, with almost a sixth of them changing their bank accounts in the past year and almost two-thirds of them now have accounts with multiple providers. A combination of the Current Account Switching Scheme (CASS), which makes it easy to transfer obligations to a new account, and the wide range of significant incentives (with bonuses in the £150-£200 range) and rewards mean churn across the market. There are plenty of web resources showing consumers just how much money they can make this way. In way, it is not surprising that so many people do it, but that so few do it because they do not have the time, the financial literacy or the inclination to go through account opening and processing.

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The Riksbank’s view is that the future infrastructure for retail payments will have to comply with European standards, be ready to receive retail payments both instantly and at predetermined times, and facilitate the entry of new actors using new technologies.

“In recent years the clearing infrastructure has not kept pace with the development of new standards, legal requirements and other changes taking place in the Swedish market for retail payments,” states the central bank. “The Riksbank therefore sees a need to modernise the infrastructure for clearing and settling retail payments in a way that meets these changes and anticipates future needs.”

The central bank says that payments should, as far as possible, be settled at the Riksbank in central bank money. New players, including payment and e-money institutes, should be able to apply for access to the Riksbank’s settlement system and to the infrastructure for clearing payments.

From: Sweden’s Riksbank presents case for modernisation of retail payments infrastructure.

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A successful hack on a Meta contractor has led to a data leak of 200,000 Facebook Marketplace user data on a hacking forum, Bleeping Computer reports. Numerous pieces of personally identifiable information (PII), such as names, phone numbers, email addresses, Facebook IDs, and profile details, are said to be contained in the compromised database.

From: Facebook Marketplace Records Leaked, 200,000 User Data Now in a Hacking Forum.

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As concerns arise regarding the effects of social media usage on children’s mental health, state legislators are introducing measures to protect children while using the internet and internet-based forms of communication, including social media.

From: Social Media and Children 2024 Legislation.

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In 2015 the European Union capped credit-card interchange fees at 0.3%. Research by the European Commission estimates that 70% or so of the reduction has been passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices.

From: What Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders get wrong about credit cards.

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Sumit Agarwal of the National University of Singapore, Andrea Presbitero of the imf, and André Silva and Carlo Wix of the Federal Reserve find that American credit-card-reward programmes redistribute around $15bn a year from “naive” to “sophisticated” consumers.

From: What Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders get wrong about credit cards.

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Like most price controls, capping interest rates would distort the market and hurt ordinary punters. Card issuers would probably respond by locking out less reliable borrowers, not by offering cheaper rates. Worse still, Messrs Trump and Sanders are looking past genuine problems with American credit cards. That may be because the problems stem from something stupendously popular: ultra-generous rewards.

From: What Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders get wrong about credit cards.

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