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Last October Zambia became the first country on the continent to accept mining royalties and taxes in yuan. This eases capital flows between Zambia and China, the biggest buyer of Zambia’s abundant copper and its biggest creditor. It also reduces Zambian exposure to the dollar. What is more, since December the Bank of Zambia has required domestic transactions to be paid in local currency, boosting demand for the kwacha. Offenders face fines, up to two years in prison or both.

From: African countries are souring on the dollar.

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Getting into the flow gives you the opportunity to price. It does not tell you what to charge for. The processors that are struggling treated the payment event as the product. The processors that are winning treat the payment event as the entry point to something the merchant values more.

From: Processors: Understanding Competitive Dynamics | Noyes Payments Blog.

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Digital identity means a shake-up is coming in payments. As Tom Noyes puts it, with characteristic accuracy, “a very large share of what a processor sells today exists because we cannot reliably establish who is on the other side of a transaction”. Indeed.

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A very large share of what a processor sells today exists because we cannot reliably establish who is on the other side of a transaction.

From: Processors: Understanding Competitive Dynamics | Noyes Payments Blog.

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China released about 128,000 new microdramas in the first quarter of 2026. More than 95 percent of them are AI productions, Caixin, a Chinese financial-news magazine, reported in June.

From: Will Audiences Watch AI Actors? In China, the Answer Is Yes – The Ankler.

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Toppan has developed a contact and contactless smart card that runs NIST-standardized post-quantum algorithms alongside conventional cryptography for government and medical authentication.
PQC CARD Dual supports ML-KEM for establishing shared cryptographic keys and ML-DSA for creating and verifying digital signatures. It also includes RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) to allow issuers to continue working with existing readers and authentication systems.

From: Toppan develops post-quantum smart card for government, healthcare IDs | Biometric Update.

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To that end, Allen writes that “the Panel queried whether the intended concept was really an age verification result. That question matters because one of the principal attractions of digital proof of age is selective disclosure.” The Panel suggested replacing “identification” with “age verification result” – but the Home Office says it’s not necessary, and that, in keeping with established legal language, “identification” should be understood in this context as “identification for a specific purpose: establishing whether the customer has attained the relevant age.”

From: Home Office provides answers on using digital ID to prove age for alcohol sales | Biometric Update.

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Key insights: Tech companies such as Robinhood and OpenAI are counting on AI agents to provide more insights into consumers’ financial lives, and sometimes, self-execute payments and rebalance investment portfolios. Some fear that retail banking is the next logical evolution for agent-led automation. 
What’s at stake: Banks could face disintermediation and deposit liquidity risk if consumers get more comfortable with AI agents acting on their behalf, but there’s still immediate risk of consumers turning over their banking information to large language models.

From: Do AI agents create disintermediation risk for banks? | American Banker.

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Establishing appropriate governance policies is also key. Identity and access management teams must first discover and register these agents, then define how they  are created, authenticated, and authorized. There are a few things to keep in mind in this regard:
1) All AI agents should be tied to clear ownership, lifecycle controls, and system-of-record governance  within the identity ecosystem.
2) Access should be granted based on least privilege, and adjusted dynamically based on context and risk.
3) Ongoing monitoring is essential to detect anomalies and respond in real time.
4) Policies should reflect the level of risk associated with each agent’s function and access level.
Organizations that get this right are able to move faster with confidence, reducing friction for developers while maintaining the guardrails needed to protect customer data and experiences.

From: Agentic AI demands unified approach to human and non-human identity | Biometric Update.

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A global platform cannot build twenty versions of its front door. It builds one that satisfies the strictest, most common requirement, and because the most widespread demand is “upload an ID,” that becomes the default that the whole internet inherits. Fragmentation does not average out to a reasonable outcome; it ratchets toward the most invasive option. The result is a growing archipelago of digital identity honeypots: centralized repositories of passports and face scans sitting on servers, waiting to be breached.

From: How Age Verification Could Hard-Wire Identity Surveillance | Observer.

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