Snippings

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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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Ravelin

Based on a survey of 6,000 adults across the UK, France, and Germany, this new research sheds new light on the soaring phenomenon of friendly and first-party fraud and policy abuse by consumers.

Download The dark side of online shopping – the rise of friendly fraud to find out who is committing fraud, why and how: 
Why 40% of online shoppers committed fraud in the past year

From: Ravelin’s consumer & friendly fraud survey 2023.

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When we asked Cassie to give up contactless she saved £15 on her weekly supermarket shop by swerving her usual sweet treat and a bottle of wine.

From: Two mums save £166 a week switching from contactless to cash as experts say using coins and pennies helps to budget | The Sun.

What this has to do with contactless I’m not sure.

If you read any business or finance news this week, it is impossible not to notice that it is Davos time again. Davos, which is the World Economic Forum’s annual event at which the global elite flying in by private plane and helicopter to discuss global warming and so on, never seemed particularly interesting to me. I rather agree with Andrew Curry, who says that the worst thing about the event is the temptation to take it seriously. Nevertheless, finance leaders do turn up and make speeches and in recent years these have naturally covered the evolution of fintechs and techfins, so I have from time to time found some interesting comments to reflect on.

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Amazon Pay had less than 2% of U.S. digital wallet market share by payment volume as of 2022, compared to Shop Pay’s 6%, Apple Pay’s 21% and PayPal’s 58%, according to Bernstein analyst estimates.

From: Why Shopify Has Payments Power Over Amazon — The Information.

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For Amazon, providing customer checkout and delivery services to merchants that don’t sell on its site offers a tantalizing growth opportunity. But to take full advantage of it, Amazon has to figure out how to work with archrival Shopify, which is a key gatekeeper because it sells e-commerce software to millions of mostly small online merchants. Now Amazon has agreed to let Shopify handle payments Amazon has traditionally arranged itself.

From: Why Shopify Has Payments Power Over Amazon — The Information.

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Momentum around central bank digital currency development is building steadily. Of the central banks that responded to our survey, 41% expect to have launched a CBDC within five years (Figure 1). In last year’s survey, this figure was 36%. The proportion of central banks who do not expect to launch a digital currency has fallen from 35% in 2022 to 19% this year.

From: CBDCs set to acquire critical mass in next five years – OMFIF.

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British crime fighters cracked a money-laundering network that they say moved more than £100 million, equivalent to $125 million. A London court found two men guilty of illegal smuggling on Thursday, taking convictions in the network of cash couriers to 16, according to the National Crime Agency.

The network’s couriers, typically posing as tourists, were paid up to £5,000 to carry the cash bags. They flew business class for the extra luggage allowances, and moved £1 million or more by checking-in three or four suitcases.

From: What’s in Those Huge Suitcases? $125 Million in Cash – WSJ.

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