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In the second quarter of 2023, the average costs of sending USD 200 to developing regions continued to be high at 6.2 per cent, more than twice the target of 3 per cent of the Sustainable Development Goal 10.c.1 (Ratha et al., 2023a). Sub-Saharan Africa continued to have the highest average remittance costs, at about 7.9 per cent; South Asia had the lowest average remittance costs at 4.3 per cent (ibid.).

Though mobile operations account for less than 1 per cent of transfer volumes, they remain the cheapest channel for sending remittances, with an average cost of 4.1 per cent during the second quarter of 2023, followed by money transfer operators (average cost of 5.3%) and post offices (7%) (ibid.). With an average cost of 12 per cent during Q2 2023, banks remained the most expensive channel for remittance transfers (ibid.)

From: Remittances data.

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More than half of all U.S. adults ages 18 to 34 use it, according to Pew Research Center, while about a third of those 29 and under say they regularly get news on TikTok, up from less than 10% in 2020.

From: How TikTok Is Wiring Gen Z’s Money Brain – WSJ.

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Some 91% of Gen Zers say they have purchased something they saw on social media, according to a survey from Citizens Pay, a buy-now-pay-later service from Citizens.

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Americans under 30 get much of their news on TikTok. They hear about money there, too, and that’s shaping the way they save, spend and view their financial prospects, young adults and economists say.

From: How TikTok Is Wiring Gen Z’s Money Brain – WSJ.

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What I absolutely don’t understand, is the request is to provide our bank details again separately on headed paper. The first time I was asked to do this I didn’t have anything ready to send so how did I produce headed paper? Well, it wasn’t too hard. I typed our bank details into a word document, added a clever little watermark, put our logo at the top, added our company info and saved as a PDF. Hey presto, undeniable proof of our details. I am sure that nobody that makes a living out of committing fraud would ever have such ingenuity.

From: (1) Time to Rethink Collecting Bank Details: Let’s make Gavin happy.

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Now, for the 1st time ever, you can buy a real-world item on Roblox!

Visit our 🛍️ IRL commerce shop 🛍️ in this experience to check out the real-world items chosen by our partner UGC creators— MD17_RBLX, Junozy, & Sarabxlla.

Each purchase comes with a 🎊FREE VIRTUAL TWIN 🎊 created by our partner UGC creators.

From: Walmart Discovered – Roblox.

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Discrepancy between total transfer volume vs. bot-adjusted transfer volume. When we apply a simple heuristic that removes inorganic data, we see that transfer volume for the last 30 days can be adjusted from $2.65T to $265B2

From: Making sense of stablecoins | Visa.

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In a Delhi High Court proceeding last Thursday, WhatsApp said it would be forced to leave the country if the court required traceability, as doing so would mean breaking end-to-end encryption.

From: WhatsApp could leave India over encryption battle – Rest of World.

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Indonesia’s Bukalapak, an e-commerce platform with more than 150 million users and 20 million business owners, partnered with Standard Chartered nexus to launch its own digital banking service, powered by audax. They have launched BukaTabungan which provides a paperless, digital banking access, serving Bukalapak’s more than 150 million users and 20 million business owners. By August 2023, the latest reported data available, it had 230,000 active users, and 98% of them were new to the bank.

Through audax’s tech solution, Bukalapak is offering current account and savings account services, debit cards and, to its whitelisted users, lending.

From: Standard Chartered Offers Banking As A Service (BaaS) Through audax.

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Mr Khan calls the accounts and sites that plant the story “seeders”. Rather than using hundreds of fake accounts to promote these sites’ material, distribution instead relies on a few so-called “spreaders”—social-media accounts with large numbers of followers. Spreader accounts typically build a following by posting about football, or featuring scantily clad women. “And then they’ll flip,” says Mr Khan: they start mixing in disinformation from seeders, by linking to or reposting their content.

From: Disinformation is on the rise. How does it work?.

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Both the video clips and audio were probably created using artificial intelligence (ai) and posted by a Chinese state-backed propaganda group known variously as Spamouflage, Dragonbridge and Storm-1376. In a report released on April 5th, the Threat Intelligence team at Microsoft, a tech firm, said this was the first time it had seen a nation-state use ai-generated material to sway a foreign election.

From: Disinformation is on the rise. How does it work?.

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