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These figures are consistent with figures from opinion polls which suggest that around 1.6 percent of those who intended to vote were unable to do so, although those figures include both individuals who were unable to vote and individuals who, though able, did not return after failing to show qualifying ID.
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PayPal used its inaugural PayPal X Innovate 2009 conference in San Francisco to officially announce the PayPal X program to release APIs allowing developers to integrate PayPal seamlessly into third-party applications.
From: PayPal Introduces Open API to Put Payments Into Apps | PCWorld.
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On Thursday night, Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure experienced a widespread outage. By Friday morning, the situation turned into a perfect storm when the security firm CrowdStrike released a flawed software update that sent Windows computers into a catastrophic reboot spiral. A Microsoft spokesperson tells WIRED that the two IT failures are unrelated.
From: How One Bad CrowdStrike Update Crashed the World’s Computers | WIRED.
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The EF market generated an estimated €20 billion to €30 billion in Europe in 2023, about 3 percent of total banking revenues.1 Over the last ten years in Europe, embedded-finance volumes grew three times as fast as directly distributed loans. In 2023 and 2024, we interviewed a range of business leaders in the EF value chain. They expect consumer credit volumes to continue migrating toward embedded lending. For SMEs, leaders expect factoring and other straightforward types of financing to become embedded as enterprise resource planning vendors and SME-supplier marketplaces provide them at the point of need.
Combining the addressable-market forecasts with experts’ growth predictions allowed us to estimate future EF revenues. EF channels might initiate 20 to 25 percent of retail banking sales to individuals and SMEs and account for 20 to 25 percent of retail and SME lending, up from 5 to 10 percent today (exhibit). By 2030, the EF market could surpass €100 billion and account for 10 to 15 percent of banking revenue pools.
From: Embedded finance: How banks and customer platforms are converging | McKinsey.
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What the underserved need are not banks but new kinds of regulated financial institutions that deliver the modern services needed to support a 24/7 always-on economy. What are these services? As the economist John Kay noted in his recent paper on “A Robust and Resilient Finance” for the Korean Institute of Finance, while “many aspects of the modern financial system are designed to give an impression of overwhelming urgency… only its most boring part – the payments system – is an essential utility on whose continuous functioning the modern economy depends”.
In similar vein, in their new book “The Pay Off-How Changing the Way we Pay Changes Everything” Gottfriend Leibrandt (who was CEO of SWIFT from 2012 until 2019) and Natasha de Teran write that “while access to a banking system is seen as a crucial part of a country’s development and necessary for lifting people out of poverty, it is not as basic a need as the ability to pay”.
In other words, the fundamental need and the basis for inclusion in society is not a bank account or anything like it, but a safe and secure way to get paid and to pay for goods and services. And this is not a revelation! It seems to me that great many people would be well served by a simple digital wallet that might be provided by any of range of organisations from Facebook to Square. The goal of a modern and forward-looking strategy should be not to bank the unbanked but to unbank the banked.
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Although most banks became more profitable as the Federal Reserve raised rates in 2022–23, a smaller group of banks saw consistent decreases in their net interest margins (NIMs). The distribution of bank NIMs widened over this period, largely due to differences in banks’ business models: “margin-decreasing” banks were more involved in capital markets, with higher shares of trading assets and non-deposit funding even prior to the rate hike cycle.
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Scammers are using AI technology to fake videos of famous TV doctors like Hilary Jones, Michael Mosley and Rangan Chatterjee to push their products to the unsuspecting public on social media.
A new report, published in the prestigious British Medical Journal (BMJ), warned of the growing rise of so-called ‘deepfakes’ as research suggests up to half of us can no longer tell them apart from the real thing.
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The United States is the only country in the world in which both federal and state governments possess independent and yet overlapping authority for bank chartering, regulation, and supervision. This system is now under stress. The source of this stress is a new breed of technology-driven financial institutions, licensed and regulated almost entirely at the state level, that provide money and payments outside the perimeter of both conventional bank regulation and the financial safety net.
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Chase told customers that it will stop allowing its credit cards to be used to pay for third-party buy now, pay later (BNPL) plans. This change comes at a time when Chase offers its own BNPL option — Chase Pay Over Time — and was likely made to boost customers’ interest in its own offering, Newsweek reported Tuesday (July 16).
From: Chase to Decline Credit Card Payments for Third-Party BNPL Plans.
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Transactional data shows the exploiter is actively selling the stolen holding using the onchain exchange Uniswap.
From: North-Korea Behind WazirX’s $230M Hack, Says Elliptic as SHIB, WRX Tumble.
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