Snippings

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At the heart of this transformation lies the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI Wallet), which will serve as a trusted and interoperable tool for securely sharing verified identity credentials across borders and sectors. The challenge for financial institutions is twofold: determining when and how these wallets will impact their customer and operational workflows and defining their role within this ecosystem. Traditionally, banks have operated purely as relying parties, consuming verified identities issued by others. Under the new framework, however, they may also act as issuers or verifiers of credentials. This expansion of roles opens opportunities to build deeper trust relationships with customers and to streamline compliance processes through verified digital attestations

From: Europe’s new digital identity framework: urgency and opportunity for financial institutions.

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FATF reports that weak or inconsistent know your customer (KYC) and Travel Rule implementation had substantially increased the risk of stablecoins being used for money laundering and terrorist financing.

From: ‘Cash to Crypto Swaps’ Use Stablecoins to Bypass Bank Security.

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Facial recognition technology that has been used hundreds of times a day by British police forces is biased against minority groups and women, the Home Office has acknowledged.

Official research showed that the technology identified the wrong person about 100 times more often for Asian and Black people than white people, and twice as often for women than men.

From: Facial recognition technology used by UK police is biased, Home Office admits.

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The European Commission’s tech policy lead, Henna Virkkunen (a Finnish politician who studied philosophy and began her career as a horse caretaker), alleges that blue checks are deceptive because they imply identity verification, though X doesn’t actually verify users’ identities.

From: EU Slams X With $140m Fine for ‘Deceptive’ Blue Checks.

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The bank, a subsidiary of electronics giant Sony, has enlisted Bastion, a financial institution for regulated stablecoin services, to help it roll out the offering next year.

Bastion will be the sole issuance provider and be responsible for reserve management and custody.

Sony plans to use the stablecoin to offer customers in-app digital currency payments for streaming and commerce in the entertainment sector, covering things like games, anime, movies and music. The firm is one of the largest video games players in the world, via its PlayStation Store, and also owns anime streaming platform Crunchyroll.

The token could also be used for Sony Group’s treasury operations and inter-company settlement, says Bastion.

From: Sony plans USD stablecoin.

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Recently, we estimate, the employment-weighted share of Americans using ai at work has fallen by a percentage point, and now sits at 11% (see chart 1). Adoption has fallen sharply at the largest businesses, those employing over 250 people. Three years into the generative-ai wave, demand for the technology looks surprisingly flimsy

From: Investors expect AI use to soar. That’s not happening.

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For decades, the global financial system has operated on a bifurcated model.

Messaging (Payment): The instruction to move value. This happens near-instantly. When a credit card is swiped, the authorization message travels from the merchant terminal to the issuer in milliseconds (ex ISO 8583, SWIFT, …etc)
Movement (Settlement): The actual transfer of funds between balance sheets. This happens days later, often involving batch processing, netting, and a chain of correspondent banks (nostro/vostro accounts).
This latency creates counterparty risk, traps liquidity in pre-funded accounts, and generates reconciliation friction that costs the global economy billions annually. Stablecoins flatten this hierarchy. In the stablecoin model, the issuer holds the omnibus account, becoming both the network and the ledger. The transfer of the token is the settlement. It is an atomic transaction where the messaging and the movement are identical and simultaneous.

From: Stablecoin Scenarios | Noyes Payments Blog.

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Perplexity’s view

Amazon should love this. Easier shopping means more transactions and happier customers. But Amazon doesn’t care. They’re more interested in serving you ads, sponsored results, and influencing your purchasing decisions with upsells and confusing offers.

From: Bullying is Not Innovation.

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Consumers are largely ambivalent.

They don’t benefit from lower fees.

They don’t benefit from faster settlements.

And consumers definitely lose out from the lack of a chargeback mechanism.

From: Why Ryanair wants you to Pay by Bank | Payments Culture.

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Tinder has announced that its newly introduced identity-verification feature, Face Check, has led to a 60 % decline in exposure to so-called “bad actors” on the platform. The safety measure – a short video-selfie biometric check powered by FaceTec – is now required for new users in California and seven other countries, with broader U.S. expansion planned in the coming months.

According to a press release issued by Match Group, the rollout of Face Check has produced early results showing more than a 60 % reduction in exposure to potentially deceptive profiles, along with a more than 40 % drop in user-reported incidents involving such accounts. The system works by matching a user’s live video selfie to existing profile photos and detecting duplicate faces across multiple accounts. When successfully verified, the user receives a “Photo Verified” badge.

From: Tinder Sees 60% Drop in Bad Actors After Face ID Launch – Global Dating Insights.

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