Snippings

xxx

Our investigations have found that scams on Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram — all platforms owned by the social media behemoth Meta — account for an astonishing 16 per cent of all the crimes recorded in the UK.

From: How social media scams claim more victims than robbery, burglary, homicide and knife crime combined | This is Money.

xxx

xxx

Their solution to the peso’s credibility problem has been simply to make it harder to buy dollars.
There are now as many as a dozen different exchange rates, depending on who wants to access the US currency and why.

From: How Argentina learned to love the US dollar – BBC News.

xxx

xxx

AI is more likely to help Big Tech companies cement their dominance. They are the ones with the resources to develop and maintain the most powerful AI models, and they are already moving quickly to bundle LLMs with their existing services. These developments come at a time when antitrust authorities around the world are already growing increasingly concerned about tech companies’ market power.

From: Unlocking AI’s Potential for Everyone by Diane Coyle – Project Syndicate.

xxx

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.

xxx

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.

xxx

xxx

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.

xxx

xxx

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.

xxx

xxx

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.

xxx

xxx

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.

xxx

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.

xxx