Snippings

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According to Christopher Stanley, the Head of Payments at X, the platform’s payment capabilities will extend far beyond simple tipping. Users can soon store money in their X Wallet, send funds to other X Payments users, and even earn interest on their account holdings.

“Think Venmo at first,” Stanley explained, “Then, as things evolve, you can gain interest, buy products, eventually use it to buy things in stores (think Apple Pay).”

As Stanley puts it, the ultimate goal is to create a self-contained financial ecosystem within the X platform. “The end goal is if you ever have any incentive to take money out of our system, then we have failed, you shouldn’t ever need to take money out because you should be able to do anything you need on our platform,” he stated.

From: Elon Musk Aims to Transform X into Your Bank Account Alternative.

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The European Union is poised to approve proposed policy changes next month from Apple that would enable third-party firms to access the tech giant’s devices’ antenna for tap-and-pay transactions using Near Field Communication, Reuters reports. The move means that third-party apps could be the default digital wallet app for tapping to pay in the EU with an iPhone, expanding users’ checkout options from Apple Pay, which currently is the devices’ only contactless payment option.

From: Mastercard using open banking to spot fraud, EU warms to Apple Pay policy | PaymentsSource | American Banker.

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Last year, the ECB published its “stocktake”, the findings of the work the Eurosystem carried out during the digital euro investigation phase, which lasted from October 2021 until October 2023. In this, they talk about how a digital euro would be usable online and offline. In their words, the “offline” mode would designed to maximise certain cash-like characteristics: that is, a bearer payment instrument “that is not dependent on an online connection, but is limited to proximity payments”.

But why should edge transactions be limited to proximity payments? It seems to me that if the system has the capability to implement device-to-device transfers (ie, edge transactions) then transactions should always be device-to-device whether the devices are local or remote.

From: The ECB Warn That The IPhone Is “Incompatible With Digital Currency”.

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the FDIC may have experienced mission-creep, taking it upon itself to rescue uninsured depositors whenever possible

From: Why Have Uninsured Depositors Become De Facto Insured? by Michael Ohlrogge :: SSRN.

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For “unisured depositors” read “voters”.

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Money launderers surreptitiously introduce more than $2 trillion in proceeds from illegal enterprises to global financial systems every year, according to estimates. International airplane passengers likely ferry hundreds of billions of dollars worth of that in cash, according to figures from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental agency that develops anti-money-laundering standards for countries.

From: Billions in Dirty Money Flies Under the Radar at World’s Busiest Airports – WSJ.

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In December 2020, Clarke was arrested with around $9 million worth of gold on a private plane in Zanzibar

Given that record-breaking heat means that ice cubes now cost more than bread in parts of Mali, I wonder if any intrepid New England entrepreneurs are rethinking about rebooting the ice trade that brought so much prosperity a couple of hundred years ago?

The ice trade? Yes.

If you are worried about AI coming for your job, spare a thought for the sex workers complaining that Meta is letting adult chatbots roam free while strictly policing humans and over-enforcing rules about adult content. Also spare a thought for the poor influencers who will be sidelined by TikTok, which has been talking to advertisers about using AI-powered avatars to compete with human creators for advertising deals.

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Criminals are deliberating uploading child abuse material to rival hacking and fraud related Discord servers to have them shut down.

From: Criminals Are Weaponizing Child Abuse Imagery to Ban Discord Servers.

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Visa has launched open banking in the US, using technology from recently acquired Swedish vendor Tink. Available via a single console, user can currently access financial data to confirm bank account data, run real-time balance checks and fetch transaction data from thousands of banks across the US.

From: Visa launches open banking with Tink in the US.

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European Central Bank (ECB) executive board member Piero Cipollone has called for changes to tech firm Apple’s payments system.

Cipollone said Apple must change its approach in a letter sent to Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for the internal market, on April 19. He warned that its current approach could be incompatible with making offline payments in any future European central bank digital currency.

“Apple’s proposed commitments would not give third parties full access to the secure element (SE), but only allow for the usage of the host card emulation (HCE),” Cipollone said. He added this would not be “at par with the user experience offered by Apple Pay when it comes to authentication and transaction speed”.

HCE-based payment solutions allow banks to build their own apps which could compete with Apple Pay. But they would be at a fundamental disadvantage with Apple Pay, as they would be unable to hold the card’s details in the secure element.

Most importantly, the current solution would be incompatible with plans to create a possible European central bank digital currency (CBDC). “Access to the SE is vital for mobile device based offline digital euro payments,” Cipollone added.

From: ECB says iPhone is currently incompatible with digital euro – Central Banking.

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