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Now Plaid, which has around 1,000 employees, is leaning more heavily on selling identity verification tools and services related to loan applications and payments, competing with firms such as Socure, Stripe and Finicity.

Some of Plaid’s diversification has come by way of its acquisition of identity verification startup Cognito for a reported $250 million in 2022. Plaid has been able to cross-sell that service, which allows businesses to screen new users for fraud risk, to nearly half of its new customers, Eric Sager, Plaid’s chief operating officer, told The Information.

From Plaid’s Leadership Evolves to Prove It’s Not a One-Hit Wonder — The Information:

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AI is being considered for fraud protection efforts in different ways by these organizations. Schmiedl said JPMorgan Chase has evolved from algorithms to machine learning and neural nets to look at fraudulent card activity, examining unstructured data, and entity extraction. “There’s an inherent signal in every email,” he said. “Actors that are trying to create fraudulent emails tend to basically use different patterns and you can learn those patterns through AI/ML.”

JPMorgan Chase is assessing the use of large language models, Schmiedl said, for fraud, risk, and other possible areas. Such efforts have focused on in-house data and resources, he said, focusing on the firm’s own ecosystem rather than looking externally. “If you start using these models and outside data, you start to see things that are presented like facts that aren’t facts,” Schmiedl said.

From Confronting Financial Fraud in Payments with the Help of AI:

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We observe that no archetype achieves online and cash-like offline payments use cases. Other trade-offs can be discerned, e.g., cash-like offline versus compliance, and extensibility versus offline. These suggest that a system based on a single archetype will not likely satisfy all policy goals of a retail CBDC system. It is more likely that a hybrid system combining aspects of more than one archetype would be needed to meet the central bank’s goals.

From Archetypes for a retail CBDC – Bank of Canada.

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In December, ABC Investigations revealed how criminals were gaining unauthorised entry to the ATO’s data by creating false myGov accounts and linking them to the tax files of genuine taxpayers.

myGov is the central hub used to access an array of Commonwealth services including the ATO, Medicare, and Services Australia.

The report exposed how credentials stolen from high-profile hacks like Medibank and Optus have been used by criminals to circumvent security checkpoints used by the ATO, and how the agency was failing to identify some fraudulent activity on accounts it managed.

The tax office has now revealed through a Freedom of Information request that more than $557 million was fraudulently claimed in less than two years by fraudsters cheating the identity checks set by the tax office, and hacking into genuine taxpayers’ ATO accounts.

From ATO reveals more than $557 million claimed by fraudsters exploiting security loophole – ABC News.

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In the future, open banking-style data sharing by investors could spark innovation in new fintech services for retail investors. A form of digital ID has helped market reform in the likes of Singapore and Sweden, where 22 per cent of households own stocks and shares compared with 11 per cent in the UK according to think-tank New Financial.

From Let’s kill off the City’s old-fashioned paper fetish once and for all | Financial Times.

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How many individual investors hold paper share certificates is a matter of debate. One oft-cited estimate reckons 10mn people. Another puts the total at 8.6mn certificates, many held by the same investors and about half of which are in just five companies.

From Let’s kill off the City’s old-fashioned paper fetish once and for all | Financial Times.

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John Nosta

Augmenting Reality: The Vision Pro, with its ability to overlay digital information onto our physical environment, embodies the second phase of Baudrillard’s simulacra: the distortion of reality. It does this by creating a digital twin of the real world that isn’t exactly an accurate representation but a stylized, user-friendly version, packed with additional information and interactive elements. This represents a potentially critical shift in our experience of the world around us, further blurring the line between the real and the simulated.

The Illusion of Reality: Vision Pro can also switch to full virtual reality, arguably encapsulating the third phase of Baudrillard’s simulacra: the replacement of reality. In this phase, the virtual environment doesn’t merely distort reality but replaces it entirely. This new “reality” is not a reference to anything real but is a simulation that stands on its own. In the hyperreal world of Vision Pro, one could argue, reality is no longer a prerequisite.

From Apple’s Vision Pro: The Precarious New Age of Hyperreality | Psychology Today.

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Plaid Transfer, a versatile platform, will offer multi-rail support, enabling users to access a range of payment options, including ACH (Automated Clearing House), RTP (Real-Time Payments), and the upcoming FedNow service.

Additionally, the system will incorporate intelligent features to assess account eligibility for instant payouts and facilitate dynamic routing for transactions between FedNow, RTP, and ACH (Same Day or standard)

From Plaid to Introduce Instant Payouts with FedNow Support, in Collaboration with Cross River Bank | The Fintech Times.

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Conclusion: Locals want access to US dollars and the crypto rails provide a very convenient / easy path to access it.

From: Patrick McCorry (💙,🧡) on Twitter: “I asked the following questions at meet-ups in Kenya and Nigeria: Who gets paid in crypto? -> 80% of people raised their hand Who gets paid in local currency? -> 5% of people raised their hand Who prefers crypto (btc, eth, et al) over stable coins? -> 2-5 people raised…” / X.

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British banks are collectively shutting around more than 1,000 accounts every working day according to data obtained from a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.

The details were revealed over the weekend by The Mail on Sunday, which made the request to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

According to the newspaper, the number of accounts being closed down has increased significantly in the recent years, jumping from below 50,000 in 2016 to nearly 350,000 in 2022.

From: UK banks closing ‘over 1000 accounts’ per day – FStech Financial Sector Technology.

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