Snippings

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Innovations such as digital wallets aim to form the foundational technology that will allow governments and businesses secure digital identities.

“We never really thought about what does it mean to identify a person on the internet in a way that is portable and doesn’t require you to rely on a single private platform,” Mike Brock, CEO of Block’s TBD, said in an interview with PYMNTS.

From New Car Sales Expected to Reach Highest Level Since 2019.

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Although the share of adults holding a primary credit card issued by a national bank has declined from 76% to 68% since 2020, these FIs are still the dominant issuers of consumer credit cards in the U.S.

From Consumers Pick National Banks Most for Primary Credit Cards.

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o do this licitly, you need to get a money transmitter license everywhere your customers want to pay as many as one employee, which (very quickly) means all 50 states and then some.

This is not hard relative to creating a fusion reactor, but is hard relative to creating a functioning Rails app.

From Payroll providers, Power, Respect.

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Visa’s efforts, via Visa Direct, have made headway in forging that connectivity, with more than 65 use cases already in play and the ability to reach more than 8.5 billion endpoints. The payment network has developed, with partners, aliases and directories that allow instant access to sender and receiver bank accounts by linking to emails or mobile devices — even nicknames.

From Visa: Orchestration Layers Pave Way for Instant Payments Ubiquity.

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The aliases could (and should) be digital identities.

The PSR 

 

 If a consumer is classed as vulnerable, the consumer standard of caution

exception can’t be used by the PSP to deny reimbursement.

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Deloitte conducted a consumer survey in Germany, the most pro-cash nation in the EU, with intriguing results for the digital euro.
71% of 18-34 year olds trust the ECB to issue the digital euro! (See graph above) But a mere 23% of 55+ year-olds trust the ECB! How ironic is that?

From: Web3 isn’t just for crypto, but MUST use CBDC if it practices the “inclusion” it preaches..

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Every day, 3 trillion dollars worth of transactions are handled by a 64-year-old programming language that hardly anybody knows anymore.

It’s called COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), and despite the fact that most schools and universities stopped teaching it decades ago, it remains one of the top mainframe programming languages used today, especially in industries like banking, automotive, insurance, government, healthcare, and finance. According to the International Journal of Advanced Research in Science, Communication and Technology (IJARSCT), 43 percent of all banking systems are still using COBOL, which handles those $3 trillion daily transactions, including 95 percent of all ATM activity in the US, and 80 percent of all in-person credit card transactions.

The problem is that very few people are interested in learning COBOL these days. Coding it is cumbersome, it reads like an English lesson (too much typing), the coding format is meticulous and inflexible, and it takes far longer to compile than its competitors. And since nobody’s learning it anymore, programmers who can work with and maintain all that code are a increasingly hard to find. Many of these “COBOL cowboys” are aging out of the workforce, and replacements are in short supply.

From The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore | PCMag.

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It’s the potential for games to act as bank accounts.

Ok, not literally, but here are some interesting data points (taken from the report):

There are 1.7 billion underbanked adults in the world, but roughly 1.2 billion of them own a smartphone.
There are roughly 3.4 billion gamers, or 1 in every 2.36 people.
90% of Gen Z, 80% of Millenials and 63% of Gen X interact with games and/or the metaverse.

From Friday, Dec 15, 2023 – by Noelle Acheson.

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Synthetic identity fraud has become one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity threats. It accounts for nearly 80% of all identity fraud in the U.S. and is estimated to cost businesses close to $5 billion in 2024. What makes this type of fraud so damaging? There are two main factors at play: The sophistication of the attacks, and the difficulty of verifying when they’ve even occurred.

From Combatting synthetic identity fraud – Ekata, a Mastercard company.

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The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) is evaluating uses for digital IDs such as state mDLs. Credit unions have completed pilots using digital IDs and have reported more efficient onboarding processes, according to Charles Vice, director of Financial Technology and Access at the NCUA. Digital IDs pose opportunities to better serve the unbanked population, as well.

From US committee sees AI fintech threat, public ready for biometric defense | Biometric Update.

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