Snippings

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Klarna has joined Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard designed to enable AI agents and commerce systems to interact across the shopping lifecycle. The announcement expands Klarna’s existing partnership with Google, which spans Google Pay, Google Store, Google Play and Google Cloud infrastructure. Klarna’s support for both the Universal Commerce Protocol and the Agent Payments Protocol reflects the company’s positioning within AI-driven commerce infrastructure development.

From: Klarna supports Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol | The Paypers.

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They said they later found that the people who had scammed them had stolen the identity of both the landlord of the property and a letting agency in order to carry out the scheme.

From: Friends left ‘in tears’ over £8k rental scam on London flat – BBC News.

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Thus far, the story of prediction markets in America has mainly been about betting on sports, particularly in states where sports gambling is illegal. In California and Texas, you can’t legally bet on an NFL or NBA game on DraftKings or FanDuel — but thanks to a contested regulatory quirk, you can on Kalshi, for now.

From: Prediction Market Bubble: Super Bowl Proves Polymarket, Kalshi Boom – Business Insider.

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It looks like Monopoly money, but there is a twist: colourful imitation Russian banknotes are designed to help move roubles around the world in defiance of western restrictions that have severely constrained cross-border payments.

From: Inside the Russian Monopoly money network moving billions over borders.

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AI is likely to erode bank profitability as consumers start routinely using AI agents to optimize their finances (for example, automatically moving deposits into higher-yield accounts), which would reduce customer inertia and reshape industry economics. Agentic AI could disrupt deposits and credit card lending in particular by cutting through inertia. Today, $23 trillion of the global total of $70 trillion in consumer deposits sits in checking accounts with near-zero rates, while the remainder is parked in accounts that often pay relatively low savings rates, according to McKinsey Panorama data.3 If just 5 to 10 percent of checking balances migrated to top-of-market rates, an action that might be prompted by AI agents, that could reduce the banking industry’s total deposit profits by 20 percent or more.

The threat from third-party agents could be material. If banks don’t reposition their business models to adapt, over the next decade or so, bank profit pools globally could decline by $170 billion, or 9 percent.4 That’s enough to bring average returns below the cost of capital.

From: McKinsey’s Global Banking Annual Review 2025 | McKinsey.

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Other scenarios appear less likely. For example, scenario C3, in which consumers fully delegate financial decision-making to AI agents and banks drastically reduce their head counts, hinges on two factors that are unlikely in the medium term: regulatory acceptance of agents autonomously executing transactions on customers’ behalf and AI’s ability to replicate senior-level decision-making. Still, even if consumers are required to give final approval to transactions orchestrated by AI agents, meaning these agents aren’t fully autonomous, such a model could cause major disruption to the industry, as seen in our central scenario.

From: McKinsey’s Global Banking Annual Review 2025 | McKinsey.

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PWC looks at the future of banking and sees a 2X increase in customer retention rates, and a 30% increase in lead conversion rates, while McKinsey predicts big losses.

Which is it?

I don’t buy into PWC’s increase in customer retention and conversion rates when agents bring transparency to finance, as suggested by McKinsey.

From: Suspiciously Inflated Stablecoin Stats Fuel FOMO Surge.

I’m which Rich Turrin on this one. Transparency in finance is problematic given existing business models.

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The US Treasury recently confirmed that it has minted its last penny. However, 19% of Square transactions in the country are made with cash. In a given week, at least 16.7 million pennies cross the counters of local businesses using Square.

To help sellers deal with this, the firm is now piloting technology that it already uses in Australia and Canada.

Cash transactions will be automatically rounded to the nearest 5¢, with back-end transaction reporting assisting sellers with reporting the total dollar amount of tax collected.

From: Square pilots cash rounding to help sellers with penny’s demise.

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“She called that phone number, ends up speaking to someone that she believed was a representative of her bank,” Guelph police spokesperson Scott Tracey told CBC News… Over a series of phone calls, the woman was told to withdraw all funds from her account and deposit the cash into cryptocurrency ATMs.

From: Guelph senior loses $800K to scammers pretending to be bank representatives | CBC News.

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Kyrgyzstan has officially launched USDKG, a gold-backed stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar, with an initial issue of $50 million. The token is issued on Tron and fully audited by ConsenSys Diligence

From: Kyrgyzstan launches $50M gold-backed USDKG stablecoin to modernize cross-border payments | Markets Insider.

 

 

Operational control — including gold management — is delegated to a private company registered in the Kyrgyz Republic, under a contractual agreement with the USDKG issuer.xxx