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David Birch and Victoria Richardson’s Money in the Metaverse dives into the heart of the monetary system underpinning the metaverse, exploring its potential impact on business and commerce. The book unpacks complex concepts like digital assets, online identities, and spatial computing, making them understandable for both tech enthusiasts and those new to the virtual world.

One of the book’s strengths is its clear structure. Birch and Richardson establish a foundational understanding of the metaverse, then delve into the various digital assets that will fuel its economy. They create a taxonomy – a system for classifying these assets – which provides a framework for comprehending the diverse virtual goods users will encounter. This includes everything from avatar clothing to virtual land ownership.

The concept of online identity takes center stage as well. The authors propose a “tried-and-tested model” for navigating this new landscape. Understanding how we represent ourselves virtually and the security considerations involved is crucial for safe and successful participation in the metaverse.

The book shines in its exploration of the real-world business opportunities presented by the metaverse. Birch and Richardson outline how companies can leverage virtual spaces for marketing, sales, and even creating entirely new revenue streams. They don’t shy away from the challenges, however, acknowledging issues like data security and regulation that need to be addressed.

From: (4) The Money Book Circle series – Q2 2024 edition.

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Tokyo, June 3, 2024, Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd. (DNP) and MUFG Bank, Ltd. (MUFG Bank) are partnering to develop systems to enable the use of Verifiable Credentials (VCs)1, and digital certificates. Other participating companies and organizations include, Australian Payments Plus, which provide the ID platform ConnectID3 that realizes secure and easy data distribution, National Australia Bank (NAB) and Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), which provide ID data for ConnectID, along with Meeco,4 Australia’s leading provider of decentralized identity technology.

From: DNP and MUFG Aiming to Commercialize Digital IDs | DNP Group.

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Michael says he was lucky that he lost the password years ago because, otherwise, he would have sold off the bitcoin when it was worth $40,000 a coin and missed out on a greater fortune.

From: How Researchers Cracked an 11-Year-Old Password to a $3 Million Crypto Wallet | WIRED.

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The RoboForm program unwisely tied the random passwords it generated to the date and time on the user’s computer—it determined the computer’s date and time, and then generated passwords that were predictable. If you knew the date and time and other parameters, you could compute any password that would have been generated on a certain date and time in the past.

From: How Researchers Cracked an 11-Year-Old Password to a $3 Million Crypto Wallet | WIRED.

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Curve’s one-to-many card routing (allowed in EEA) allows similar functionality to Visa’s new Flexible credentials. Where Curve operates under the existing transaction mechanics, Visa’s Flex credential enables retrieval of the underlying card. It allows each Issuer to approve the “wrapping” entity or wallet just as they do under staged digital wallet rules. Both Visa VTS and MA MDES allow issuers to approve “wallets” and provision payment tokens. There are no US exceptions to this process.

From: ApplePay gets iOS Competition – Curve | Noyes Payments Blog.

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The database contained sensitive information on 560 million users, including payment data, but also containing people’s names, postal addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, ticket sales and event details, order information, and even partial payment card data, for sale. The partial payment card data includes cardholder names, the last four digits of the cards, expiration dates, and some customer fraud details.

From: Ticketmaster breached — data of over 500 million users allegedly put up for sale online | TechRadar.

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Yale SOM’s Balázs Kovács used ChatGPT to write a series of Yelp-style reviews, as well as collecting real reviews from the site, and then asked human subjects to decide which was the real thing. They were more convinced of the authenticity of the AI-written reviews.

From: AI Can Write a More Believable Restaurant Review Than a Human Can | Yale Insights.

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In an interview with PYMNTS following the retailer’s launch of gamified marketplace Walmart Realm, Justin Breton, the company’s director of brand experiences and strategic partnerships, discussed this demand for more engaging online buying options.

“Steeped in data, we followed these three trends: customers enjoy brands they shop with more when they have unique virtual experiences; customers want to be entertained while shopping; [and] customers enjoy and are inspired by virtual games where they can immediately purchase items they discover,” Breton said.

A share of shoppers is voicing demand for more immersive purchasing experiences.

From: Walmart Exec Details Immersive Experiences In Digital ‘Realm’.

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Parliament notified up to 9,000 staffers earlier this month that it had suffered a data breach of its online recruitment application called PEOPLE, which contained ID card details, birth certificates, diplomas, employment history, medical records, rights to entitlements, insurance and proof of work dating back 10 years of part of the Parliament’s staff.

From: EU Parliament staff in uproar over breach of ID cards, personal records – POLITICO.

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The “challenger banks” didn’t really disrupt the retail finance world. I love the banking app on my phone, and there is no doubt that the pressure from new players has led to a better interface, better user experience and a better service. However, when it comes down to financial services, I use it to access checking account, savings account, debit card and mortgage products that are exactly the same as they were a generation ago.

Today, around two-thirds of British adults use a mobile banking app up from a third a decade ago as the incumbents developed and extended their own digital banking services. The challengers have a nice niche for payment management but they are not a replacement for traditional current accounts.

I think it’s time for another review of terminology and I’ve got a couple of suggestions. Let’s standardise this way: a “neo-bank” is something that looks like bank, but isn’t (eg, my Simple account when I first got it and before they were taken over by BBVA, which is an actual bank, and then shut down), whereas a “near-bank” is something that performs a function traditionally associated with banks but isn’t a bank and doesn’t look like a bank (eg, Wise). Then we have the non-bank, which isn’t a bank and doesn’t perform a function traditionally associated with banks but nevertheless embeds financial services (such as an accounts package that uses transactional data to deliver data-driven liquidity). Oh, and then we have challenger banks.

Challenger banks are not a special or different kind of bank. They are just banks. They may be banks, neo-banks or near-banks or non-banks that perhaps address a new niche, or deliver interesting new functionality into an existing niche, but they are not a distinct category. They are banks. That’s it. So when people talk about the “challengers” to the incumbent big banks, I do not see Monzo in my fevered imagination, but Amazon. It’s BigTech that is the real challenger.

Monzo once said that it was on a mission to usurp “legacy” banks, particularly the Big Four of HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds and NatWest that dominate the UK market. They have attracted nearly 10 million customers (not including the British finance minister) and have some £11 billion under management and while they have not yet overthrown the incumbents, they have arguably succeeded in their mission of setting new standards for digital banking; features such as foreign currency transactions and bill-splitting, along with reliable, smartphone-friendly technology, are loved by younger customers.

(They have a way to go to a billion customers even though they are now profitable. But its hard to keep up the fintech pace as you mature. Acquisition costs were £4 a couple of years back, £14 last year and now £25 per net new customer. A high number of customers come from referrals, but they account for a less than a fifth of the growth.)