A library of snippets
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“Their long-term strategy is the tech, not the bank,” said one former senior employee. “Starling Bank might become a spin off but the primary business model is to franchise out the tech stack.”
From Can Starling Bank make tech its business? | Financial Times:
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Nigel Farage finished his Today interview by saying “I don’t want…….us pushed toward Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)”. This, I’m sure, was music to the ears of his supporters who think that CBDCs are a government conspiracy in waiting, and wrongly blame government for the decline in cash usage. But if we don’t create some form of public digital money, in which a democratically elected government sets the framework (as they do with cash) on how it is used, then we will inevitably see more and more cases where people are made ‘non-persons’ like Nigel Farage was by Natwest.
From HUMAN RIGHTS AND NIGEL WRONGED – Payments: Banks, Big Tech and CBDCs | LinkedIn:
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The IMF working paper on digital tokens sets them in clear context. It notes that tokens are a product of shared ledger technologies of which the bitcoin blockchain is the best-known working example, but it is only one of the the technical possibilities and there are many alternatives (such as the Hedera Hashgraph, for example)
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To add to the complexities, there are enhanced Know Your Client requirements where individuals are politically exposed persons. Many of us really can’t be bothered to put up with the hassle of extra work during the sign-up process with the prospect of additional problems building up further down the line.
One thing that seems almost certain is that the politician involved will kick up a massive fuss if you increase their fees to cover the additional costs. If nothing else, many people who achieve this esteemed status have an inflated view of their own value and a strong desire to argue – just try listening to debates in the House of Commons.
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Well-known payments expert Richard Crone, someone I always pay attention to, wrote recently that the real value of a digital wallet lies not in its ability to manage payments but as as platform “leveraging verified federated identity”, with which I could not agree more, and that such a platform will uses AI to deliver new services. I. Might even go further and says that digital wallets will be used by bots more than by people because most payments are boring and people shouldn’t have to deal with them at all.
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At the core of Amazon’s effort is a new product called Bedrock. Available inside AWS, Bedrock lets developers select from a range of AI models, including from Anthropic, AI21 Labs, and Stability AI. Using these models, developers can build their own products, like AI chatbots, and then run them on AWS’s infrastructure.
Bloomberg, for instance, built BloombergGPT, a bot for financial information, on a Bedrock precursor called Sagemaker. To do it, the company took four decades of unstructured financial data and analytics, loaded it into AWS, added some other training material, and tuned the model. Bedrock should make such a process faster, with pre-loaded models in a catalog. Once built, Amazon then support the products. When people chat with BloombergGPT, for instance, it uses Amazon’s storage to work, so Amazon gets paid every step of the way.
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A company affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda mouthpiece has started issuing “data certificates” for proving data ownership and trading rights, ostensibly to stimulate data trade.
People Data, which falls under the People’s Daily, gave out three certificates, covering data ownership, data processing rights and data product management rights, respectively, the firm announced on its website on Tuesday.
Government agencies, institutions and corporate entities in China are trying to profit from the trading of data, which has been identified as a new production factor along with capital, land, labour and technology. Local governments in southern tech hub Shenzhen and coastal financial centre Shanghai, for instance, have launched data exchanges to try to bridge demand and supply.
However, a long list of legal and practical issues related to data trading have yet to be resolved. One of them is the fundamental question of who owns what data.The main entrance of the People’s Daily office in Beijing. Photo: Reuters
In a bid to verify data ownership, People Data has created People’s Chain – a so-called blockchain-as-a-service platform based on the shared, immutable ledger technology.The company said its certificates contain a range of information, including the origin, type, industry, use case scenario, sensitivity, and effective date of the concerned data.
People Data has stated that it hopes to build a nationwide data transaction platform. According to samples of its certificates, the data resource ownership category covers real estate data, while the data processing rights category encompasses “public opinion”, and the data management category contains information about the country’s lottery promotion efforts in 2022.
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WormGPT is the malicious version of ChatGPT, and it was released this month. It does reply to queries that include malicious content, while other known generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Bing can’t.
It is important to remember that WormGPT is a malicious chatbot created to aid online criminals in committing crimes. WormGPT is not advised to be used for anything, thus. We can better grasp the value of utilizing technology ethically and responsibly if we are aware of the dangers linked with WormGPT and its possible effects. Let’s examine the characteristics of WormGPT, how it differs from other GPT models, and the associated dangers.
From What Is WormGPT And How To Use It: Explained – Dataconomy.
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The British newspapers have been full of stories about high-profile people being denied bank accounts. This is a consequence of people being in the public eye, politically-exposed persons (PEPs) and other categories of customers being subject to special, extra checks and risk assessment. I think some of the criticism of the banks is harsh, considering that they are only implementing the rules set down by regulators, but there is no doubt that there is a real problem here. Is there a way for fintechs to fix it? I think so, and this because while I am not convinced that a bank account is a human right, I think a payment account is.
(My favourite example of this concern the launch of the Apple Card. In a test run for the new product, Goldman Sachs underwriting system rejected Apple’s CEO Tim Cook. Executives had to step in to make a one-off exception to get him his card!)
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Within two months of downloading Replika, Denise Valenciano, a 30-year-old woman in San Diego, left her boyfriend and is now “happily retired from human relationships.”
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Snippings