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RedyRef said it more than doubled its shipments of reverse ATMs in the first five months of the year compared with the same period in 2023.

From: Want to Pay Cash? That’ll Cost You Extra – WSJ.

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When Noa Khamallah recently tried to pay cash for popcorn and soda at Yankee Stadium, his almighty dollars struck out.

The stadium’s concession stands no longer take cash. An employee directed him to a kiosk that could convert his greenbacks into plastic. Khamallah, 41 years old, fed $200 into the reverse ATM, which subtracted a $3.50 fee and spat out a debit card with a balance of $196.50.

From: Want to Pay Cash? That’ll Cost You Extra – WSJ.

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More interestingly, future politicians will largely be AI-driven. I don’t mean that AI will replace humans as politicians. Absent a major cultural shift—and some serious changes in the law—that won’t happen. But as AI starts to look and feel more human, our human politicians will start to look and feel more like AI. I think we will be OK with it, because it’s a path we’ve been walking down for a long time. Any major politician today is just the public face of a complex socio-technical system. When the president makes a speech, we all know that they didn’t write it. When a legislator sends out a campaign email, we know that they didn’t write that either—even if they signed it. And when we get a holiday card from any of these people, we know that it was signed by an autopen. Those things are so much a part of politics today that we don’t even think about it. In the future, we’ll accept that almost all communications from our leaders will be written by AI. We’ll accept that they use AI tools for making political and policy decisions. And for planning their campaigns. And for everything else they do. None of this is necessarily bad. But it does change the nature of politics and politicians—just like television and the internet did.

From: How AI Will Change Democracy – Schneier on Security.

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HARARE, May 10 (Reuters) – Zimbabwe will fine businesses using inflated exchange rates as the government battles to maintain the value of its newly introduced gold-backed currency, the Zimbabwe Gold (ZiG).
Any business using an exchange rate higher than the official rate of 13.5 ZiG per U.S. dollar will be liable for a fine of 200,000 ZiG ($14,815), according to a government notice seen by Reuters.

From: Zimbabwe to fine businesses not using official new exchange rate | Reuters.

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The BRICS group of emerging nations has been agitating for a move away from US dollar dominance.

Last year, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva called for a BRICS common currency. The economist who first gave the bloc its name said that idea was almost “embarrassing.”

While the setup of a common currency is practically challenging, the bloc — which comprises Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, which make up its acronym, along with Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates, its new members — has called for more trade and lending in local currencies as a way to break up with the dollar.

Christopher Granville, the managing director of global political research at GlobalData TS Lombard, wrote in a Friday report that there might be more traction in ditching the dollar this year when the BRICS bloc meets in the Russian city of Kazan from October 22 to October 24.

From: De-Dollarization: BRICS Could Start Knocking Down USD Payments Pillar – Business Insider.

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Still, not everyone is so optimistic. “You can certainly understand why Starling needs another story, but I’m not sure how credible it is really,” one fintech executive said, noting the difficulty and risks of propping up small banks in so many different markets.
In any case, Engine faces a competitive scene. Cloud banking fintech Thought Machine, valued at $2.7bn (£2.1bn) in 2022, has landed deals with big players like Lloyds, Standard Chartered, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley.
Other rivals include Mambu and 10x Banking. The latter’s head, Antony Jenkins, who was CEO of Barclays from 2012 to 2015, said the next decade of banking was “all about how you can harness technology to meet your customers’ needs, particularly in areas like artificial intelligence”.

From: Inside UK banks’ arms race against fintech start-ups.

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Testing is a critical aspect of software engineering, often consuming significant resources. AI enhances this phase by automating test case generation, execution, and identifying potential bugs through predictive analytics. Machine learning models can analyze codebases to predict areas prone to errors, allowing developers to focus their testing efforts more effectively.
For example, AI-powered tools like DeepCode and TestGrid use machine learning to detect potential bugs and vulnerabilities in code by learning from vast repositories of open-source projects. These tools can identify patterns that might lead to errors, such as common pitfalls in specific programming languages or frameworks. By automating the identification of these issues, AI reduces the manual effort required in the testing phase and increases the overall reliability of the software.
Moreover, AI can optimize regression testing by selecting the most relevant test cases to run when code changes are made. This selective testing ensures that modifications do not introduce new bugs, maintaining software stability without the need for exhaustive testing of the entire codebase.

From: Digital Economy Dispatch #188 — AI in Software Engineering: The Battle for the Soul of Software.

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However, she also fears that less affluent consumers stand to be priced out of traditional face-to-face advice in the wake of the regulatory focus on St James’s Place and other wealth managers. “As scrutiny of the advice sector increases, risk appetite will diminish, and I think we’ll see the minimum levels for many advice firms rise to over £100,000 of assets per client, which will push the advice gap even higher.”

As things stand, an estimated 12.4mn UK adults have money to invest but cannot afford or do not want traditional financial advice. Could AI-powered insights help them bridge this gap in an affordable and more accessible way?

For starters, AI could nudge us into starting investing at an earlier stage; there are already plenty of Open Banking apps that can use our financial data to prompt better decision making and goal setting.

From: Could AI make you a better investor?.

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And in a 2023 survey of 2,000 American travelers, 38% of Gen Z and millennial respondents said they preferred a traditional travel agent over online booking.

From: Travel Agents Are Back. and Gen Z, Millennials Love Them. – Business Insider.

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Wallets on the rise: With the increasing adoption of user-held digital identity data such as Mobile Drivers’ License (mDL), and active progress on citizen-scale digital identity projects in Europe, Australia, and several others, it’s no surprise that we’re seeing more interest in supporting technologies such as verifiable credentials and digital wallets. The majority of proposals received, however, are still relatively theoretical in nature: large-scale deployments are still some way off, and for every proposal exploring the potential benefits of wallet approaches, there is another one discussing challenges to navigate and risks to mitigate. The impact both on existing systems and processes will be significant; but with the levels of interest and investment across the industry is high and the tangible progress at national scale in several regions around the world, it’s clear that practitioners need to start considering how to adapt to these new constructs.

From: 2024 Identiverse trends report: Key findings | SC Media.

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