Snippings

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Big Tech firms don’t aspire to be banks, but they sure want a cut of their business.

Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon.com are rapidly encroaching on financial firms’ territory with digital wallets, payment apps, and even savings accounts. Banks and other financial firms are mounting a counterattack with their own apps—all fighting for a growing prize: billions of dollars in fees and other revenue as digital transactions grow from $9 trillion in 2023 to an estimated $16 trillion over the next five years, according to Juniper Research.

From: Apple and Google Could Win the War for the Digital Wallet – Barron’s.

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new research in the Global Payments Report 2024 from Worldpay.
The ubiquitous acceptance of digital wallets is enabling greater consumer choice and control in this era of payments innovation.
According to the findings, digital wallets accounted for $13.9 trillion in global transaction value in 2023, representing half of all online and 30% of consumer spend at point-of-sale (POS).

From: Global Payments Report 2024: Digital wallets to hit $25 trillion.

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Countries throughout MENA are witnessing a new wave of financial innovation with the convergence of digital wallets and Open Banking. Digital wallet providers can seamlessly integrate banking services into their platforms by using open APIs to access customer data from numerous institutions securely. Thanks to this connectivity, users benefit from improved personalisation, real-time transaction tracking, and simplified financial management

From: Open Banking and digital wallets: a fit for the MENA fintechs – ThePaypers.

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Wen eventually provided the correct blockchain address to Liffen. But the blockchain evidence didn’t match Zhang’s story. Mined bitcoin would come newly minted from just a few sources, but Zhang’s bitcoin had come from hundreds of sources, including crypto exchanges.

From: The mystery of the Hampstead mansion and the £1.4bn bitcoin haul.

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In the finest tradition of British digital identity infrastructure, the envy of less fortunate lands and famed around the world as a bulwark against chaos…

She obtained a fake gas bill Zhang could use as proof of address on a bank application

From: The mystery of the Hampstead mansion and the £1.4bn bitcoin haul.

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Ultimately, the opportunity is too good for any bank to ignore. The bigger banks will move slowly and cautiously, but they’re coming. If you wind that forward 20 years, you can see a world where banks no longer want to own distribution. They’d all start to look like Column, Lead Bank (or Griffin in the UK, who just raised their Series A). Banks, with a charter but no UI at all. Headless banks.

From: 🧠 Embedded Finance: Life after the consent orders. Apple vs DoJ.

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All but the biggest banks become headless. If embedded finance is so lucrative, why would banks operate any other way, especially smaller ones? Banks with large, profitable existing franchises are unlikely to give those up, but the prize for doing embedded finance well is too great to ignore.

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The risk to King Dollar’s status is still limited due to most nations’ alignment with the West and Beijing’s capital controls. But financial and economic linkages between China and sanctioned countries will necessarily strengthen if those countries can only accumulate reserves in China and only spend them there. Even nations that aren’t sanctioned may want to diversify their geopolitical risk.

From: If Russian Currency Reserves Aren’t Really Money, the World Is in for a Shock – WSJ.

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IndusInd Bank today announced the launch of its contactless payments wearables, ‘Indus PayWear,’ India’s first All-in-One tokenizable wearables for both debit and credit cards exclusively on Mastercard, with the offering to be extended to other card networks shortly.

From: IndusInd Bank launches India’s first contactless wearables for both credit and debit cards | Capital Market News – Business Standard.

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World ID lets you prove you’re a unique human on the internet while keeping your identity private. It’s designed to give you full control, and is built as an open protocol meant to be owned by all people.
World ID 2.0 will introduce Apps, a new way to build and use integrations to verify your online accounts using World ID. You can explore available apps on the new Worldcoin App Store, including the new integrations with Reddit, Discord, Shopify, Minecraft and Telegram.

From: Introducing World ID 2.0.

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Being asked to explain something often reveals a gap between what you think you know and what you actually know – a gap which, most of the time, we blithely under-estimate or ignore. Psychologists call this “the illusion of explanatory depth”. In experiments, they ask people if they know how a bicycle worked, or a zip, or a toilet. Of course we do, the respondents say, we’re not idiots. But when asked to explain, in words or diagrams, they produce a confused mess.

From: Why It’s Good To Be Biased – by Ian Leslie – The Ruffian.

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