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AOG Technics is believed to have invented employees with fake profiles to boost its image and also rented ‘virtual’ offices near Buckingham Palace to give it an exclusive address.

From EXCLUSIVE: Founder of firm accused of selling bogus aircraft parts used by American airlines, forcing dozens of planes to be grounded, is one-time DJ from Venezuela who recently married wife at wedding in Mallorca – where they wore matching Rolexes | Daily Mail Online.

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What the ecosystem needs for the concept of tokenized real-world assets to make a significant impact on traditional markets, is for a way for all the various walled gardens to talk to each other. Wit this, a tokenized fund on Onyx can be used as collateral in a DeFi application on Base. A tokenized fraction of a shopping mall can be swapped for a tokenized fraction of a marina on a DEX built by Deutsche Bank.

We also need some standards set on the information needed, AND how it is extracted. Reporting is a huge sunk cost on most financial systems, and blockchain systems can streamline that while enhancing transparency.

But how? Will hosts of these platforms still have to compile periodic reports? Will information be pulled via an API? How would that be structured? Information is stored differently on Avalanche vs Corda vs Fabric vs Ethereum. Who bears the cost of this development? Will regulators have a node? What requirements will these nodes need to fulfil? What will the bankruptcy rules look like? How can the potential cross-border nature of these assets be handled, when securities rules differ from region to region?

From (7) Friday, Oct 13, 2023 – by Noelle Acheson.

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The situation is more complex when it comes to “large quantities of high-quality data”… Even a technology as remarkable as AI can produce results no better than its inputs.

From New Technologies Arrive in Clusters. What Does That Mean for AI?.

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Singapore’s digital economy has expanded to about $77 billion, or 17.3% of gross domestic product, and should continue to drive growth in coming years, according to a new government report.

From Singapore Sees $77 Billion Digital Economy as Key to More Growth – Bloomberg.

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Hackers posted an initial data sample on the platform BreachForums earlier this week, claiming that it contained 1 million data points exclusively about Ashkenazi Jews. There also seem to be hundreds of thousands of users of Chinese descent impacted by the leak. On Wednesday, the actor began selling what it claims are 23andMe profiles for between $1 and $10 per account, depending on the scale of the purchase.

From: 23andMe User Data Stolen in Targeted Attack on Ashkenazi Jews | WIRED.

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When payment cards were first invented, there was no network that automatically connected together the retailers, the customers and their banks. It was not easy for the retailer to talk to the bank to find out if the customer had any money and it was just as difficult for the bank to talk to the retailer, to tell them that the customer was good for the money and that they would get paid. Since there was no network to connect together the interested parties, it made sense to build one. That’s how we ended up with VISA and MasterCard and American Express and Discover and JCB and so on.

Given that we live in a world where the Internet now exists, however, you have to wonder why things are still done that way. Why did I just give my payment card details to an airline so that the airline can give them to its bank and get charged a fee which another bank then uses to reward me with miles from a different airline? That seems like a lot of work (and a lot of intermediaries) to get money from my bank to my airline’s bank.

Wouldn’t it be easier, if the airline just said to me “hey Dave it looks like you’re buying another ticket – here’s really no need to bother Visa or MasterCard, after all they’re so busy processing all of those transactions, so why don’t you just let us our bank take the money from your bank instead?”/. And I wonder if convenience isn’t enough, they might sweeten the deal by saying “Oh and by the way, if you do that, we will give you triple miles as a thank you” with them oney they saved.

I would do that unhesitatingly.

There’s two ways that might work in practice. The airline could send me a bill there and then, a bill that pops up in my banking app and so I can okay it using my finger or face. Then my bank sends the money to the airline’s bank in milliseconds and its job done. That’s what you might call the “customer is present” account-to-account payment, generally known as the request to pay, or R2P, solution. That would make life easy when the plumber needs paying for fixing the broken tap or my sister needs paying for the gig ticket.

Alternatively, for places where I buy often, when I am part of a loyalty scheme, I could set up an arrangement with the merchant to automate payments completely. In athe case of me buying flights, I could set up an arrangement with bank and the airline so that money could move between them automatically, provided that the amounts are within certain limits and certain frequencies defined by me. So, for example, I could tell my bank if this airline comes to ask you for money from my account, that’s okay, go ahead and give them the money provided it’s not more than $10,000 and it’s not more than four times per month. 

Then next time I book a ticket, I don’t have to do anything. The airline is using some form of strong authentication (passkeys or whatever) so that they knows it’s me, the bank knows that it’s the airline and the payment falls within the preordained bounds, so the money moves instantly and everyone is happy. This is what we refer to in the UK as “variable recurring payments, or VRP, which is the “customer was present” alternative to the R2P solution.

VRPs in particular are a great payment option when there’s a need for increased speed, transparency, and control as they provide instant payment confirmation, as opposed to a two- to three-day wait with direct debits. In the UK, the regulators set out two kinds of VRP: sweeping and non-sweeping. Sweeping VRPs move money in between a customers own accounts (this is how I move money from my bank account to my pre-paid travel card acccount, for exampke) where as non-sweeping VRPs (often referred to as “commercial VRPs”) cab be embedded into a wider range of customer journeys including utilities, subscription services, retail and financial institutions.

(VRPs offer a number of specific benefits when it comes to subscription services, by the way. In a YouGov survey, more than half of the respondents said they would sign up for more subscriptions if they had one easy way to cancel them and I’m definitely in that category.)

Retailers are very keen to see VRP in the market and they’ve been waiting for awhile. And not only retailers. This time last year, the UK payment sector was getting very enthusiastic about R2P and VRP. UK payment providers reported that they expected over half of their payment flows to convert to such open banking-based payments in the next three years and one in ten ISVs expected more than three quarters of their flows to convert in the same timeframe. In fact, these payment flows are expected to treble the use of open banking in the UK by 2027.

So what has to happen to realise the benefits? Well, we are awaiting kick-off later this year (although some people are saying that this may be delayed until early 2025). The Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) consultation suggested that UK banks will have to provide commercial VRPs for free in the first instance, but if commercial VRPs are to deliver real increased competition in the market, the fact is that banks must be incentivized to invest to deliver VRPs to their customers and merchants must be incentivized to accept VRPs, meaning fees should be lower existing options (including cards).

UK Finance, the industry trade body, recently published a report on “Commercial Variable Recurring Payments Model Clauses” in created in collaboration with a dozen institutions, including banks and fintechs, so hopefully agreement on business model is not too far away. I think that R2P and VRP are a desperately needed secure and interoperable “Layer 2” for bank payments and the payments industry should be preparing to use them to share the benefits of innovation and make them the default for many use cases.

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UWB is a short-range wireless communication protocol that co-exists alongside existing standards like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC. Unlike those protocols, however, UWB enables exact location tracking down to a few inches. This allows your phone to literally guide you to the tag’s exact location once you’re within UWB range, as pictured above.

Modern flagship smartphones, including the iPhone 14, Pixel 7 Pro, and Galaxy S23 series, support UWB.

From: How do Apple AirTags work and what can you track with it?.

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It is the first such outage to affect the system in the 50 years since its inception in 1973.

From Japan’s interbank payments network goes down, hitting 1.4 million money transfers.

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The multinational technology company also argued that digital wallets were different to credit cards and therefore should not have to follow the same rules.

“Apple Pay can only operate with an existing debit, credit or prepaid card issued by a third party … Apple does not have access to a cardholder’s account to determine whether funds are available … in offering Apple Pay, Apple does not collect any transaction information.”

From Apple and Google digital wallets to be brought under payment rules for credit cards, EFTPOS – ABC News.

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t’s been a few months since the European Commission (EC) published its package of proposals for the next generation of payments regulation in the EU. The proposals—which will see PSD2 split into a new directive (PSD3) and regulation (Payment Services Regulation/PSR)—have generated plenty of headlines since their release.

The EC’s proposal to introduce an explicit baseline level of functionality and performance that all bank open banking interfaces will, at a minimum, be required to meet is encouraging. This should help to level-up the minimum level of functionality and performance that can be expected consistently across the ecosystem.

As is frequently the case, however, the devil will be in the detail and the EC has left much of the specifics of the required functionality and performance to be defined in future by the European Banking Authority (EBA) in Regulatory Technical Standards.

From Will the EC’s Proposals Unlock Open Banking’s True Potential?.

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