Snippings

It is amazing how quickly our expectations change. I recently had to fly to San Francisco, and as I had been busy chasing around events in London, I’d set aside a whole bunch of emails and other tasks to work on while in the air. I’m not sure whether it’s a badge of honour for a life spent in the service of exports for UK plc or the tragic hallmark of a wasted life, but I like working on planes. I put on my excellent noise-cancelling cans, choose music to fit the tasks at hand, open up the laptop and work in peace, focused and productive. I get lot done flying, which is handy, because I fly a lot.

So imagine how upset I was when after take off the captain annoucement that there would be no wifi on the flight because of a technical fault. Disaster. There’s no offline mode for LinkedIn.

Under the headline “Enough already’: Analysts question banks’ $650 billion tech spend”, American Banker reported on McKinsey’s observation that the technology spending at banks is somewhere around the GDP of Sweden yet does not appear to bring revenue growth. Well, duh, as they say: do the math.

Roughly 90% of bank technology spending goes on keeping the lights on, so only 10% is available to build or rebuild products and services. Of that 10% of the budget that is available for discretionary spending, 90% goes on compliance and flood defenses against a tidal wave of regulatory changes. So of that $650 billion, only $6.5 billion is really available for projects to increase revenue. The result: my bank still has a worse app than Revolut and no multi-currency account like Wise. I just tried to install my bank app on my new phone and it failed with a mysterious error message which, when I searched for it in their “help” section, meant that I had to call them. On the phone. Party like it’s 1999.

The things the bank could spend money on to generate new revenues (eg, digital identity services) seem to be stuck.

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According to the PYMNTS Intelligence report, in the U.S., the result has been strong Apple Pay growth as a percentage of retail sales volume. Between 2014 and 2021, Apple Pay growth sort of flatlined. Between 2022 and 2024, Apple Pay grew rapidly. Its growth over those two years was 41%.

At the ten-year mark, Apple Pay has a 5.6% share of retail sales. Increased merchant acceptance drove 58% of that lift. In other words, Apple Pay users could — and did — use it to pay for their purchases at more stores. Most of those purchases came from gas and C-stores, grocery stores and restaurants.

From: Apple Pay’s 10-Year Journey and Its Next Decade of Decisions.

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More than 90% of iPhone users who could tap their phone instead of a card when shopping in a store still don’t. Less than 20% of Apple Pay’s growth over the last decade has come from new users. We also see that instore use and adoption has started to plateau.

From: Apple Pay’s 10-Year Journey and Its Next Decade of Decisions.

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Stripe announced on Monday that it had agreed to acquire Bridge, a two-and-a-half-year-old San Francisco–based startup focused on payments using stablecoins, a type of crypto pegged to a traditional currency. With estimated annual revenue of around $12 million, based on its transaction volume and people with knowledge of its fee structure, Bridge is fetching an eye-popping multiple of around 90 times revenue.

From: How Stripe’s $1.1 Billion Crypto Bet Could Pay Off — The Information.

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The spoiler for this article: I’m no longer betting on verifiable credentials taking off. I mean this literally — 99% of my net worth is Trinsic stock, so the strategy I bet my company on is an objective revelation of my strongest convictions. While once central to Trinsic’s existence, our latest pivot demonstrates that I believe interoperable digital credentials won’t succeed in market anytime soon.
Specifically, my prognostication is that digital identities will continue to be deployed and adopted, but that fragmentation, incompatibility, and bespoke implementations will continue to dominate the market.

From: Why Verifiable Credentials Aren’t Widely Adopted & Why Trinsic Pivoted | by Riley Hughes | Oct, 2024 | Medium.

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It reveals that 96% of young people in the UK aged 13-18 have made an online purchase, and collectively spend an estimated £50m+ per week online.

Of those young people surveyed who could estimate how much they spend online in a typical week, 42% had subscribed to something accidentally, been scammed, or lost money in some other way.

From: A problem hiding in plain sight? | Parent Zone.

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According to the survey, 96 per cent of young people in the UK aged 13-18 have made an online purchase. Collectively they spend an estimated £50 million per week online. A week! So that’s over $2.5billion a year.

From: Kids are getting constantly scammed online too.

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If I was smart (and / or 15 years younger) my next major investigation or podcast would be about money laundering in online gaming sites. There have been a few examples exposed already, like this one from 2019, when a major firm realised the vast majority of sales on their sites was likely criminals laundering money.

From: Kids are getting constantly scammed online too.

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Either way, the G7 CEG strongly expects banks to develop a better understanding of the issues, the risks involved, and strategies for mitigating those risks.

From: Banks urged to act now to avoid future quantum catastrophe.

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If I was smart (and / or 15 years younger) my next major investigation or podcast would be about money laundering in online gaming sites. There have been a few examples exposed already, like this one from 2019, when a major firm realised the vast majority of sales on their sites was likely criminals laundering money.

From: Kids are getting constantly scammed online too.

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