Snippings

In a recent survey on “Financial Services Expectations vs Reality”, FIS found that around half of all consumers want a single platform to manage all fo their financial services from all of their providers. Buit who would provide this single platform? Apple using open finance to access all of the consumer’s accounts? The consumer’s primary bank app? A brand (Nike savings account anyone?) or maybe new specialist financial health providers. Or Meta? Twitter?

 

I have to say that I agree with Tarun Bhatnagar, President, Platform and Enterprise Products at FIS, who said that as embedded finance propositions mature, there is a significant market opportunity for financial services companies to deliver a unique all-in-one platform experience for their customers.

Think about the dynamics. The distribution side of banking has a much better return-on-equity (RoE) than the manufacturing side of banking, for the obvious reason.

So it’s attractive to for banks to try and compete on the distribution side. But on the distribution side, they are not competeing with other banks but with Google and Instagram and Tik Tok.

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The bank blocked a number of transactions, it spoke to James on the phone to warn him and even called him into a branch to speak to him face-to-face.

However, the scammer’s hold over James was so strong after being indoctrinated to this supposed plight, he insisted the payments went through.

From: Fraud victim gets surprise £153,000 refund despite rules – BBC News.

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Financial inclusion is when everyone can access financial services that can help them build wealth, including savings, credit, loans, equity, and insurance.

From: What is financial inclusion? | McKinsey.

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For a payment-oriented CBDC to successfully address unmet payment needs, the main consumer groups—who already have access to a range of payment options—would have to widely adopt the CBDC and use it at scale. This is necessary to encourage widespread merchant acceptance of CBDC, which would, in turn, encourage further consumer adoption and use. However, most consumers face few payment gaps or frictions and therefore might have relatively weak incentives to adopt and—especially—to use CBDC at scale. If that were the case, widespread merchant acceptance also would be unlikely. This suggests that addressing unmet payment needs for a minority of consumers by issuing a CBDC could be challenging under the conditions explored in this paper. The minority of consumers with unmet payment needs will only be able to benefit from a CBDC if the majority of consumers experience material benefits and therefore drive its use.

From: Unmet Payment Needs and a Central Bank Digital Currency – Bank of Canada.

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OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect have settled into the plateau of productivity. Social identities were removed from plateau status due to their maturity and broad market penetration.
The report underscores an uptick in cross-organizational use of identities, such as federation and portable identities, spanning over two decades. A surge in identity wallets, promoting selective data sharing while preserving privacy, is anticipated to sustain this trend.
Digital identity today transcends physical presence, spanning multiple systems and entities. A significant challenge for companies is overseeing machine identities. Gartner emphasizes the burgeoning ecosystem where people, machines, and organizations share and safeguard identity fragments using trusted infrastructures to access resources or validate assertions. This landscape is ripe for ongoing innovation, facilitating novel business models.
A transformative wave in this year’s Hype Cycle revolves around DCIs and verifiable claims (VCs). These tools foster trust in digital identities while granting users control over their virtual personas. Although maturing, the scalability and practicality of these technologies remain topics of debate, with competing specifications. Establishing trust mandates a mediator, emphasizing business models where third parties validate identity data.
Digital identity management of machines, encompassing devices and workloads, emerges as a universal concern. Achieving harmony between trust levels and user experience remains paramount. Alternatives to traditional passwords, such as biometric-enhanced FIDO methods, offer superior authentication experiences. CAEP further exemplifies this by facilitating risk signal sharing, paving the way for adaptive access and ongoing session management in distributed frameworks.

From: Gartner graduates OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect to the ‘Plateau of Productivity’ | Biometric Update.

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Digital ID protocols OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect have matured to the point of readiness for mainstream adoption, according to Gartner’s recently-released 2023 Hype Cycle for Digital Identity report.

From: Gartner graduates OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect to the ‘Plateau of Productivity’ | Biometric Update.

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The UK’s payment backbone went down for six hours.

The RTGS backbone settles more than £750 billion on average every working day, with peaks reaching more than £1 trillion in autumn last year, according to the Bank.

Chaps processes about £350 billion a day, including banks paying one another large sums.

From: RTGS and Chaps back online after six-hour outage.

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Open financial data is a critical enabler of financial inclusion.

From: What is financial inclusion? | McKinsey.

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Although the semi-retired couple, who wished to keep their surname private, were aware they had been part of the Medibank and Latitude data breaches, they remained unsure how the perpetrators got their licence and passport details.

From: How $370,000 was stolen from Melbourne couple: ‘It was a nightmare’ | Seniors Discount Club.

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My elderly parents in-law had their joint bank account closed by HSBC in December. We don’t really understand why but HSBC said it was because of ‘safeguarding issues’.

From: CRANE ON THE CASE: My vulnerable in-laws got ‘debanked’ by HSBC | This is Money.

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Offered a basic bank account

Having never travelled abroad or driven a car, your mother-in-law did not have any valid identification to open a new account.

You were forced to go through the ridiculous rigmarole of getting her a learner driver’s licence

From: CRANE ON THE CASE: My vulnerable in-laws got ‘debanked’ by HSBC | This is Money.

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