A library of snippets
xxx
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.
xxx
xxx
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’?.
xxx
xxx
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.
xxx
xxx
JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who is another politically influential billionaire, responded with anger. “I’ve had it with this shit,” he said at a forum at the American Bankers Association.
xxx
Matt Stoller
large banks diverted roughly $1 trillion from American consumers to themselves by keeping savings rates artificially low, even as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates and allowed banks to hike their lending rates. It’s just a pain to change bank accounts because we have a lot of financial data associated with our accounts, from bill pay to transaction lists. And so most of us didn’t change our savings accounts, even though we could have gotten higher rates elsewhere.
xxx
xxx
Confirmation of Payee in the UK has been extended to cover almost 99% of all transactions made through Faster Payments
From: Confirmation of Payee reaches almost all transactions in the UK.
xxx
xxx
The UK Finance data this week showed losses due to APP fraud in the first half of this year were down 11 per cent year-on-year to £214mn with the total number of APP cases falling 16 per cent to 97,000.
However, the same data showed cases of unauthorised card payment fraud — where the account holder does not authorise a payment — had increased.
In the first six months of the year, losses from unauthorised card payments, covering payment cards, remote banking and cheques, totalled £358mn, up 5 per cent year-on-year. Over the same period the number of cases climbed 19 per cent to just over 1.5mn.
From: Card fraud scourge prompts fresh call for social media action.
xxx
xxx
The just over $1bn in ransomware paid out by businesses in 2023 has helped fund a tech upgrade by criminal gangs. The increasing use of artificial intelligence enables hackers to industrialise and personalise attacks.
From: Cyber security companies are thriving — even when they fail.
xxx
A Russian plan to break the grip of the U.S. dollar through a new international payments network met a cool reception at the BRICS summit in Kazan this week. Despite all of the talk of new reserce currencies, the greenback’s supremacy may be strengthening because of an entirely different monetary innovation: dollar-backed stablecoins.
The CEO of Stripe, Patrick Collison, recently called stablecoins “room-temperature superconductors” for financial services which may be far less hyperbolic than it actually sounds, since the ability move money around without friction will undobtedly reshape the global financial system.
Snippings