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Shopify is deactivating Amazon Pay as a payment option from all European merchants. No reason was given and merchants are really unhappy.

From: Business of Payments – July 2024 – by Geoffrey Barraclough.

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Comparing the different methods of biometric recognitions proposed for use on payment authentication, the palm recognition is by far the most suitable. The fingerprint recognition required physical contact on the scanner glass, which is not ideal especially after the global pandemic.

Other methods including facial, iris, and voice recognition are not ergonomic enough or ideal in certain environments, hence they will not offer a seamless process that is superior to what is currently available. This leaves the palm print scanning method as the most ideal, and the process is not much more different to waving a payment card or mobile phone NFC over a POS terminal.

From: Beyond mobile wallets, palm recognition will be the next big thing in the evolution of digital payments – GlobalData.

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Why would Mr. Musk want to spend a ton of money on AML compliance and identity verification? My crackpot theory is that this is really all about identity, not money. Mr. Musk doesn’t care if he earns a single cent on you sending a couple of hundred bucks to someone for that Taylor Swift ticket. The business model of X is advertising, so he does care who you are, who you are sending money to and why you are sending it. Your data is worth vastly more than any transaction fees he might be able to collect from you.

From: X As SuperApp Or Smart Wallet: Musk, Money And Identity.

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Why would Mr. Musk want to spend a ton of money on AML compliance and identity verification? My crackpot theory is that this is really all about identity, not money. Mr. Musk doesn’t care if he earns a single cent on you sending a couple of hundred bucks to someone for that Taylor Swift ticket. The business model of X is advertising, so he does care who you are, who you are sending money to and why you are sending it. Your data is worth vastly more than any transaction fees he might be able to collect from you.

From: X As SuperApp Or Smart Wallet: Musk, Money And Identity.

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Why would Mr. Musk want to spend a ton of money on AML compliance and identity verification? My crackpot theory is that this is really all about identity, not money. Mr. Musk doesn’t care if he earns a single cent on you sending a couple of hundred bucks to someone for that Taylor Swift ticket. The business model of X is advertising, so he does care who you are, who you are sending money to and why you are sending it. Your data is worth vastly more than any transaction fees he might be able to collect from you.

From: X As SuperApp Or Smart Wallet: Musk, Money And Identity.

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constituencies within the lowest quartile of ID ownership tend to have a larger Asian, Disabled and C2/DE population than those in the highest quartile.

From: Voter ID and turnout in GE2024.

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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.

From: Voter ID and turnout in GE2024.

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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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