Snippings

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Confirmation of Payee (CoP) was introduced at the end of March 2020. With CoP, the name associated with a new payee’s account can be checked against the sort code and account number. The service has been identified by the industry as a tool that can help consumers better protect themselves and make sure they are paying in to the correct account.

From Has Confirmation of Payee been successful in combating APP fraud? | Insights | UK Finance.

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Supporting this, our recent poll found that 43 per cent of those surveyed felt that the value of using CoP to help tackle APP fraud had been neutral at best if not useless.

From Has Confirmation of Payee been successful in combating APP fraud? | Insights | UK Finance.

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PSR  Indeed, we estimate that around 130 million accounts now have access to CoP and there are more than a million CoP checks occurring every day.

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With total operating income for the quarter of $1.5 billion, we can assume SkyMiles represents about half of Delta’s profits, despite being just 11% of revenu

From 3 Facts Delta Just Dropped About SkyMiles And Their American Express Partnership – View from the Wing.

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Almost 32 per cent of Japanese men and 24 per cent of women have never been married. Ever fewer young Japanese are tying the knot and the annual number of marriages — still overwhelmingly a Japanese social prerequisite for producing children — is half what it was in the 1970s. Last year, fewer than 800,000 babies were born in Japan and the indigenous population shrank by over half a million. 

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The small rice paddies and vegetable farms on which the village lives are productive but raggedy. Electric fences surround many of the plots because Ichinono’s shrinking population no longer produces the sort of bustle and activity that once convinced bears, deer, monkeys and boars to confine themselves to the nearby hills.

From Japan’s toddler superstar: the baby bringing hope to a ghost village | Financial Times.

Wait? What? Bears? Yep. The number of bear attacks in Japan has been rising at an “alarming rate“, authorities say, mostly because young people, are leaving rural farming villages. Many of them have migrated to big cities, emptying villages or towns that have already been shrinking due to an ageing population. Faced with the problem of bears attacking depopulated rural areas, the Japanese have naturally responded with robots. They are deploying solar-powered “Monster Wolves” with “gleaming red eyes, bone-chilling howls and bared fangs” to drive away all kinds of animals in the countryside and to stop bears from entering urban areas and attacking people.

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Hands-free livestreaming: You can now livestream from the glasses to Facebook or Instagram.  And you can see the comments in your preview, or tap and hold on the side of your glasses to hear them out loud to engage with your community as you’re living in the moment.

Meta AI: We’ve integrated Meta AI, our advanced conversational assistant, on Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and optimized it for a hands-free, on-the-go experience. By saying “Hey Meta,” you can engage with Meta AI to spark creativity, get information, and control features — just by using your voice. Meta AI features will be available in the US in beta only at launch.

From Introducing the New Ray-Ban | Meta Smart Glasses | Meta.

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Hasbro, the publisher of tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons, expanded its involvement in AI in July through a collaboration with Xplored, the developer behind digital board game platform Teburu.

Hasbro Senior Vice President and General Manager of Global Brands Adam Biehl said at the time that the partnership would enable the company to “deliver innovative gameplay to our players and fans, limitless digital expansions to physical games, seamless onboarding and powerful AI-driven game mechanics.”

Biehl also mentioned in a separate interview that the company could leverage AI to create experiences capable of instantaneously reacting to player decisions and potentially simplifying rules to provide a smoother experience for newcomers.

From High-Income Earners’ Love of Installment Plans Signal Lucrative Opportunity for Merchants.

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Hasbro, the publisher of tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons, expanded its involvement in AI in July through a collaboration with Xplored, the developer behind digital board game platform Teburu.

Hasbro Senior Vice President and General Manager of Global Brands Adam Biehl said at the time that the partnership would enable the company to “deliver innovative gameplay to our players and fans, limitless digital expansions to physical games, seamless onboarding and powerful AI-driven game mechanics.”

Biehl also mentioned in a separate interview that the company could leverage AI to create experiences capable of instantaneously reacting to player decisions and potentially simplifying rules to provide a smoother experience for newcomers.

From Apple Adds Open Banking-Powered Capabilities to iPhone Wallet in UK.

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Even still, De Bolle estimated that EU authorities are confiscating less than two percent of criminal organizations’ annual earnings, money that is hidden across the globe.

From: Money-laundering criminals are adapting to new technology faster than authorities can keep up, EU report says – ICIJ.

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Meta is officially entering the AI chatbot wars, starting with its own assistant and a slew of AI characters it’s releasing in WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.

For anyone who has used OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or other chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s AI will immediately feel familiar. Meta sees it as a general-purpose assistant for everything from planning a trip with friends in a group chat to answering questions you’d normally ask a search engine. On that latter piece, Meta is announcing a partnership with Microsoft’s Bing to provide real-time web results, which sets Meta AI apart from a lot of the other free AIs out there that don’t have super recent information.

Another big aspect of the Meta AI is its ability to generate images like Midjourney or OpenAI’s DALL-E via the prompt “/imagine.” In my brief demo, it produced compelling high-res photos in a few seconds. Like all of Meta’s AI features being announced this week, this image generation is totally free to use.

Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s VP of generative AI who has been leading the assistant’s development, wouldn’t tell me exactly what it’s trained on. He described it as a “custom-made” large language model that is “based on a lot of the core principles behind Llama 2,” Meta’s latest quasi-open source model that is being quickly adopted across various industries.

From: Meta AI assistant, dozens of AI characters, come to WhatsApp, Instagram – The Verge.

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Yes, the technology to perform the checks has improved (RESTful APIs are nice!), but approval rates are stubbornly stuck in the 85-95% range, and thousands of inaccurate results occur daily. While many folks in the industry have general familiarity with KYC, it also still appears that far fewer have a deep understanding of its nuances.

From: Signals: What you need to know about Know Your Customer.

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EU industry chief Thierry Breton on Tuesday called on Apple (AAPL.O) CEO Tim Cook to open up the iPhone maker’s fiercely guarded ecosystem of hardware and software to rivals.

Breton’s comments came after meeting Cook in Brussels.

“The next job for Apple and other Big Tech, under the DMA (Digital Markets Act) is to open up its gates to competitors,” Breton told Reuters.

“Be it the electronic wallet, browsers or app stores, consumers using an Apple iPhone should be able to benefit from competitive services by a range of providers,” he said.

From: EU’s Breton tells Apple CEO to open its ecosystem to rivals | Reuters.

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