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BRUSSELS—Apple AAPL 0.60%increase; green up pointing triangle has agreed to let third-party mobile wallet and payment services in Europe use the technology behind its Apple Pay app in a move to allay competition concerns from European regulators.

The U.S. tech giant said Friday that it would allow other companies’ apps to make contactless payments on iPhones and other devices that use its iOS operating system for free, without the need to use Apple Pay or Apple Wallet.

From: Apple Offers to Open Mobile Payments to Third Parties Amid EU Antitrust Case – WSJ.

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If Apple didn’t do this, they would run the risk of being bypassed. Look at what has happened in the messaging sector.

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In an internal email on April, 8 2013, Apple senior vice president Craig Federighi wrote, “I am concerned the imessage on android would simply serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.” Allowing Apple Messages on competing operating systems, in other words, would threaten the iPhone business.

More than ten years later, Apple remains reticent to make Messages interoperable, and this has opened the door for Meta apps like WhatsApp

From: Tim Cook’s Apple Has Been Meta’s Best Friend. Completely By Accident..

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Tim Cook handed Meta a gift by insisting that Apple’s Messages synced poorly with Android.

From: WhatsApp is Finally Starting to Dominate in the United States. Here’s Why..

I have to say this is true in our family of mixed Apple and Android users: we now have a family WhatsApp group (as it seems everyone does) and we use it all the time.

If Apple refused to give any access to the wallet via NFC indefinitely, then downstream there would be the potential for the retailers and the banks

then in time the retailers and the banks would eventually 

Meanwhile in the US, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) published their report into “tap to pay”, which found that financial services providers can offer applications to facilitate POS payments but “cannot rely on NFC technology on mobile devices using Apple’s iOS operating system”. This means that competition is limited and that widely used payment apps such as PayPal, Venmo, and Cash App are not available via convenient contactless connectivity and that consumers must use Apple’s proprietary payment service, Apple Pay.

Overall, roughly three in four of 130 million iPhone users have activated Apple Pay, with nearly 56 million U.S. consumers making an in-store payment using Apple Pay in April 2023, accounting for nearly half of iOS users. And in 2021, there were an estimated 25 million Google Pay users, which is forecast to grow by another 10 million users by 2025. Visa recently reported that 1 in 3 Americans use tap-to-pay for purchases, seven times the use from just three years ago. Mastercard reported that contactless payments globally account for over 60 percent of in-person transactions.

Anil John, Technical Director of Silicon Valley Innovation Program at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, commented on that report saying that if you substitute “payments” with “identity” in much of the report, “it gives you a preview and the playbook” which made me reflect on my tongue-in-cheek reminiscences of Money20/20 in Las Vegas back in 2014 when said through the voice of an alter ego “I don’t fall for your ‘easy payment’ waffle. I know it’s just a trojan horse for your wallet play: loyalty, coupons and — if you have your dastardly way — identity.”

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In an internal email on April, 8 2013, Apple senior vice president Craig Federighi wrote, “I am concerned the imessage on android would simply serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.” Allowing Apple Messages on competing operating systems, in other words, would threaten the iPhone business.

More than ten years later, Apple remains reticent to make Messages interoperable, and this has opened the door for Meta apps like WhatsApp

From: Tim Cook’s Apple Has Been Meta’s Best Friend. Completely By Accident..

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When Tim Cook introduced Apple’s Vision Pro, he turned mixed reality into a category, not just a theory. Apple’s glossy marketing showed a new vision for the technology — one that prioritized mixed reality over virtual reality — and lifted Meta’s efforts.

From: Tim Cook’s Apple Has Been Meta’s Best Friend. Completely By Accident..

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Members of TSB’s fraud team sampled 100 Facebook Marketplace posts on their feed – including cars, watches, games consoles, air fryers and handbags – and engaged with the seller to determine whether the items were genuinely for sale, or scams.

The study concluded that 34 percent of the listings were fraudulent once the seller used tactics known to be commonly used by purchase fraud criminals. For instance, sellers deemed to be scammers directed TSB fraud experts to fake websites; refused to allow viewing of an item in person and demanded advanced fees. TSB also discovered items advertised as ‘brand new’, for hundreds of pounds less than their real retail price.

The findings chime with the excessive fraud rate from Facebook Marketplace, which currently accounts for 73 percent of all purchase fraud cases at TSB – and remains the biggest driver of fraud by volume.

From: TSB finds over a third of adverts on Facebook Marketplace could be scams.

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Banks’ share of total financial assets in almost all economies has been steadily declining. The trend is accentuated in markets where many banks have unsustainable financial returns—bank valuations remaining below book value for sustained periods—and in high-growth economies where demand for production credit is rising at a rapid pace. A cross-market review of banks suggests that those with business models anchored in primary customer relationships have high valuations.

From: To Seize a $7 Trillion Opportunity, Banks Need Bolder Strategies for Serving Customers and Society | BCG.

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Why biometrics and wearables are future POS winners

From: Why biometric and wearables are future POS winners.

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OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance (OpenID4VCI, which is barely shorter than the name of the specification), is an issuance protocol. This issuance format can be used with just about any issuance format. ISO’s mdoc, W3C’s Verifiable Credentials, it’s open to most everything. The purpose of the protocol is to make sure that the credentials are transported in a standardized way. OpenID4VCI is still in draft, so it is something of a moving target for anyone not deeply embedded in the space already.

But OpenID4VCI isn’t the only issuance protocol under development. The  ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 17 committee is working on 23220-3 – Cards and security devices for personal identification – Building blocks for identity management via mobile devices – Part 3: Protocols and services for issuing phase. My expectation is that this work will align more closely with the mdoc/mDL work and its more restricted underlying assumptions, but I am not closely tied to the ISO efforts.

From: More on the Options and Diversity of Verifiable Credentials – Spherical Cow Consulting.

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Newly launched bitcoin exchange-traded funds enable the cryptocurrency to be bought as easily as stocks, but a top Goldman Sachs executive said digital currencies are still more like roulette than anything that should be in your retirement account.
“If you want to go to Las Vegas, great,” said Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani, who leads the investment strategy group at Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management.
“People can use it if they want for total speculation, but it is not an investment and people should not be investing in cryptocurrencies, in bitcoin, in the ETF, as part of an investment portfolio.”
Mossavar-Rahmani, who helps advise the firm’s wealthy clients, said the problem with cryptocurrency is that there’s no real value to it—except for criminals. She compared crypto unfavorably to artificial intelligence, source of a separate speculative frenzy.

From: Goldman Investing Chief: ETFs Don’t Make Bitcoin an Investment.

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(Business Insider verified earnings by reviewing Venmo, Zelle, PayPal, and mobile deposits that were made to Lee’s bank account in early December.)

From: Ex-Wall Street Accountant Now Stripper: How She Makes Holiday Fortune.

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Early last year, Jimmy Su, the chief security officer for cryptocurrency exchange Binance, told Cointelegraph that deepfake tools today are sufficient to pass liveness checks, even those that require users to perform actions like head turns in real time.

The takeaway is that KYC, which was already hit or miss, could soon become effectively useless as a security measure. Su, for one, doesn’t believe deepfaked images and video have reached the point where they can fool human reviewers. But it might only be a matter of time before that changes.

From: GenAI could make KYC effectively useless | TechCrunch.

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