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But is the industry at risk of overplaying the quality of its “human” support — and underplaying recent technological improvements?

“We all like to think our listening and empathy skills are too advanced to be replicated. But advice businesses historically struggle to scale up due to the personal nature of advice and the inconsistency that is inherent in human nature,” says Ian Millward of Candid Financial Advice. “Ultimately, every question that ever needs to be asked has been asked. AI can model outcomes and provide the most proven answer to every question in an incredibly consistent way.”

As the technology progresses, there is increasing scope for AI to help human advisers understand their customers more deeply.

From: Wealth managers need to adopt AI — and fast.

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Key Concepts of ZKP:

Completeness: If the statement is true, an honest verifier will be convinced by an honest prover.
Soundness: If the statement is false, no cheating prover can convince the honest verifier that it is true, except with some small probability.
Zero-knowledge: If the statement is true, no verifier learns anything other than the fact that the statement is true.

From: Zero Knowledge Proofs in Digital Identity | Extrimian.

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Millennials have also emerged as prime targets for cybercriminals, receiving 37.5% of phishing emails. This is particularly true within the finance, legal and healthcare sectors. Social engineering tactics, including personalized attacks timed around events like Valentine’s Day, further underscore the evolving landscape of cyber-threats.

From: Quishing Attacks Jump Tenfold, Attachment Payloads Halve – Infosecurity Magazine.

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Days after claiming that it had hacked the US Federal Reserve, the Russia-linked LockBit ransomware gang has posted stolen customer data from Evolve Bank & Trust on the dark web.

From: Evolve Bank confirms data stolen by ransomware gang.

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With the transaction complete, the combination of Visa and Pismo will provide clients with core banking and card-issuer processing capabilities across all product types via cloud native APIs. Pismo’s platform will also enable Visa to provide support and connectivity for emerging payment schemes and RTP networks for financial institution clients.

From: Visa – Visa Completes Acquisition of Pismo.

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Supporters of the Charter include the Bank of England as well as representatives from banknote and coin producers, commercial banks, machine suppliers, ATM operators and other suppliers.

The Charter sets out a series of commitments and targets that seek to establish a collaborative approach and a roadmap of initiatives to drive significant change in the industry. Three particular areas of focus have been identified – energy, plastics and carbon – with a number of ambitious targets already agreed:

Carbon – Aim to achieve Net Zero carbon for each organisation’s own operations by 2030

Plastic – Aim to eliminate single-use non-recyclable plastic in note centres by 2030 (25% reduction by 2023, 50% reduction by 2025). For coins, to reduce the use of single-use non-recyclable plastic, by weight, to less than 45% by 2030 (less than 70% by 2023, less than 60% by 2025.

Energy – Aim to use 100% Renewable Electricity for own operations by 2022

From: UK Cash Industry Environment Charter | NatWest Group.

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Well, I won’t keep you in suspense, the results are as follows (from the most to the least environmentally friendly).

Credit transfers and debit transfers in batch mode. Credit transfers are better for the environment than debit transfers. In fact credit transfers are better than debit transfters all round which is why we should all be buulding “single credit message” (SCM) infrastuctures and layering request-to-pay (R2P) and variable recurring payment (VRP) layers on top for the use of businesses and customers. Not only the most environmentally friendly but also the overall lowest cost platform for the wider econony 

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Leading the charge with this use case are KBC and Howest University of Applied Sciences. In a joint press release KBC announced that “Howest and KBC will be launching Europe’s first digital student card in the coming academic year. The card will be stored in KBC Mobile under ‘My Trustbox’ and provides easy and secure access to student services and benefits”.

Statements in the press release from both KBC and Howest showcase the benefits of EBSI. They highlight the importance of customer convenience and control over data, as well as interoperability with other applications and other wallets such as the European Digital Identity Wallet .

Echoing the benefits that citizen centric approaches bring to education, the Spanish RoyalMint and partner universities announced a similar pilot, shortly after theBelgian announcement.

From: EU Digital Identity: EBSI, EUDI and Verifiable Credentials for Education.

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Meeco is delighted to be a technology partner on the ground-breaking EBSI project, working alongside KBC and Howest product development teams.

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Social media scammers are now exploiting this desperation, the Times reported, leading to learners forking out up to £250 for non-existent driving tests through dodgy Facebook groups that advertise last-minute test slots, often run from other countries including Bangladesh.

From: Rise of the rogue driving instructors! How scammers are taking advantage of record waits for tests and lessons to fleece learners out of huge sums of money for non-existent exams | Daily Mail Online.

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It’s a rule of thumb as old as the internet that every new technology’s first application is pornography. That’s held true for generative AI, despite the developers of many AI tools’ best attempts to prevent the creation of X-rated content using their services. So it’s little surprise that when AI company Luma Labs launched a new video-generation service this week called Dream Machine, it was immediately “jailbroken” by users to produce porn. Pliny the Prompter, the self-described whitehat “AI red teamer” who demonstrated the steps necessary to hijack the service for smut, showed that a variety of tricks can bypass its safeguards.

From: A Catastrophic Hospital Hack Ends in a Leak of 300M Patient Records | WIRED.

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