A library of snippets
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It looks like Monopoly money, but there is a twist: colourful imitation Russian banknotes are designed to help move roubles around the world in defiance of western restrictions that have severely constrained cross-border payments.
From: Inside the Russian Monopoly money network moving billions over borders.
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AI is likely to erode bank profitability as consumers start routinely using AI agents to optimize their finances (for example, automatically moving deposits into higher-yield accounts), which would reduce customer inertia and reshape industry economics. Agentic AI could disrupt deposits and credit card lending in particular by cutting through inertia. Today, $23 trillion of the global total of $70 trillion in consumer deposits sits in checking accounts with near-zero rates, while the remainder is parked in accounts that often pay relatively low savings rates, according to McKinsey Panorama data.3 If just 5 to 10 percent of checking balances migrated to top-of-market rates, an action that might be prompted by AI agents, that could reduce the banking industry’s total deposit profits by 20 percent or more.
The threat from third-party agents could be material. If banks don’t reposition their business models to adapt, over the next decade or so, bank profit pools globally could decline by $170 billion, or 9 percent.4 That’s enough to bring average returns below the cost of capital.
From: McKinsey’s Global Banking Annual Review 2025 | McKinsey.
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Other scenarios appear less likely. For example, scenario C3, in which consumers fully delegate financial decision-making to AI agents and banks drastically reduce their head counts, hinges on two factors that are unlikely in the medium term: regulatory acceptance of agents autonomously executing transactions on customers’ behalf and AI’s ability to replicate senior-level decision-making. Still, even if consumers are required to give final approval to transactions orchestrated by AI agents, meaning these agents aren’t fully autonomous, such a model could cause major disruption to the industry, as seen in our central scenario.
From: McKinsey’s Global Banking Annual Review 2025 | McKinsey.
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PWC looks at the future of banking and sees a 2X increase in customer retention rates, and a 30% increase in lead conversion rates, while McKinsey predicts big losses.
Which is it?
I don’t buy into PWC’s increase in customer retention and conversion rates when agents bring transparency to finance, as suggested by McKinsey.
From: Suspiciously Inflated Stablecoin Stats Fuel FOMO Surge.
I’m which Rich Turrin on this one. Transparency in finance is problematic given existing business models.
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The US Treasury recently confirmed that it has minted its last penny. However, 19% of Square transactions in the country are made with cash. In a given week, at least 16.7 million pennies cross the counters of local businesses using Square.
To help sellers deal with this, the firm is now piloting technology that it already uses in Australia and Canada.
Cash transactions will be automatically rounded to the nearest 5¢, with back-end transaction reporting assisting sellers with reporting the total dollar amount of tax collected.
From: Square pilots cash rounding to help sellers with penny’s demise.
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“She called that phone number, ends up speaking to someone that she believed was a representative of her bank,” Guelph police spokesperson Scott Tracey told CBC News… Over a series of phone calls, the woman was told to withdraw all funds from her account and deposit the cash into cryptocurrency ATMs.
From: Guelph senior loses $800K to scammers pretending to be bank representatives | CBC News.
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Kyrgyzstan has officially launched USDKG, a gold-backed stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar, with an initial issue of $50 million. The token is issued on Tron and fully audited by ConsenSys Diligence
Operational control — including gold management — is delegated to a private company registered in the Kyrgyz Republic, under a contractual agreement with the USDKG issuer.xxx
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Machine Identity Security covers the lifecycle and governance of non-person entities, including issuance, rotation and decommissioning of credentials, approvals around high-risk entitlements, and policy enforcement for machine-to-machine communication. Agent Identity Security, a newer capability, is aimed at generative AI agents and autonomous software that can take actions on behalf of employees. SailPoint’s messaging stresses the need to anchor these agents in the same governance fabric as human users, so that access is least-privilege, actions are auditable and regulators can trace responsibility when an agent touches sensitive data or systems.
From: SailPoint’s “Navigator – Digital Identity Flex” Targets Machine and Agent Identities – ID Tech.
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Other than being incredibly entertaining and slightly worrying for those concerned about AI gaining sentience, OpenClaw and Moltbook offer a glimpse of where AI is going.
Actually, that wasn’t the lesson I took away from my first look at what was going on over there. The lesson that I took away from (you will not be surprised to hear) is that without a working digital identity infrastructure, we can’t have nice things.
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A new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and Federal Reserve System colleagues, Using Digital Identity to Support Access to Payments , examines how digital identity systems could support access to payments.
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Snippings