Snippings

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Aadhaar is a good example of Indian governments well intended biometric plan and novel idea to reduce bureaucracy and fraud, is now threatening the individual privacy of all its users and limiting the constitutional rights of Indian citizens.

From (PDF) A Study On Aadhar Privacy And Personal Security Issues In India.

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None of the CBDC projects investigated in our report have been designed, trialled, or launched in a way which properly preserves privacy.

None of the CBDC pilots we looked at have been successful. Many have had a low uptake.

CBDCs are not a solution to the complex causes of financial exclusion and can make this problem worse.

From No Spycoin — Big Brother Watch.

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Digital authoritarianism has been on the rise for a decade, and surveillance technology has already given authoritarian governments powerful new strategies to crack down on opposition: let the protests happen, but then detect and quietly go after the participants after the fact. More generally, my basic fear is that the same kinds of managerial technologies that allow OpenAI to serve over a hundred million customers with 500 employees will also allow a 500-person political elite, or even a 5-person board, to maintain an iron fist over an entire country. With modern surveillance to collect information, and modern AI to interpret it, there may be no place to hide.

From My techno-optimism.

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Private cryptocurrencies have failed the basic test of digital money and are likely to be in decline in the near future

This is the view of Ravi Menon, retiring head of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) who belives he is not the only one on the way out.

Despite the savage criticism of private crypto, Menon was more positive about the potential of stablecoins and tokenisation.

The regulator has recently granted in-house approval to three firms issuing stablecoins – StraitsX SGD Issuance, StraitsX USD Issuance and Paxos Digital Singapore.

From MAS chief rubbishes private crypto in speech.

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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The Middle East is fast becoming the global hotspot for the real-time payments revolution sweeping the globe. The region is the fastest-growing real-time payments market globally, with transactions in the region expected to grow from $675 million in 2022 to $2.6 billion by 2027, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30.6%, according to the 2023 Prime Time for Real-Time report, published by ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ: ACIW), a global leader in mission-critical, real-time payments software, in partnership with GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

From The Middle East Is the Fastest Growing Real-Time Payments Market Globally, Finds ACI Worldwide Report | ACI Worldwide.

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The UAE payments industry is projected to record a 55 per cent jump in total revenue pool to $19.8 billion in five years, on the back of growing digital transactions and technological advancements powered by GenAI.

Analysts at Boston Consulting Group said in a research note that the UAE-based payment providers are “uniquely positioned to redefine their roles and services” as the global payments ecosystem undergoes changes.

From Technology to spur UAE payments sector revenue to $19.8bln by 2027: BCG.

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Already a home to multiple financial centres with rapidly maturing capital markets – GCC countries possess strong demographic potential, a business-friendly entrepreneurial culture, and a rapidly maturing regulatory landscape. Over the past year, legal frameworks for Open Banking have been launched and updated in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – with others in the region following suit. The most recent is Saudi Arabia, which issued a comprehensive framework in November 2022 based on international best practices.

These policies set out comprehensive frameworks for Open Banking, incorporating legislation, regulatory guidelines, and technical standards. This makes it much easier for Third-Party Providers (or TPPs) to become catalyst for innovate new services that have the potential to make banking more accessible (and therefore more inclusive), more competitive, and more affordable for new and growing businesses.

From The open banking revolution: Unlocking opportunities for cross-border trade – Edge Middle East.

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On November 8, millions of Australians experienced a failure of their telecommunication services for about 14 hours. Optus, one of the service providers blamed the outage on a “network event” that triggered a “cascading failure”.  While some were frustrated they could not get emails or see the latest Facebook posts, this outage also affected the ability of non cash payments to be completed.  Taxis, small business owners, coffee shops, fast food places could not serve customers who did not have cash. So this raises the question, are telecommunication failures good for cash?

From: Are Telecommunication Failures Good For Cash ? – Banknote World.

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No, they are good for those of us who have maintained from the very beginning that electronic cash alternatives must work offline, device-to-device in the absence of mobile phone coverage or internet accesss.

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The RBA found most Australians used cash infrequently in 2022 – if at all.
“Just over half of the respondents did not use cash at all during the diary week in 2022

From: Finance news: Cash payments continue to decline as Aussies move to electronic methods.

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15 per cent of Canadians use cash to make ‘under the table’ payments.

From: Canadians report a love-hate relationship with cash, reveals new Payments Canada study.

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