A library of snippets
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Take Elon, for example, who helped found PayPal in 1999 and therefore knows a little bit about the payments system. In his recent interview, he describes the financial system as a heterogenous set of databases that “slowly engage in batch processing.”
Having subsequently switched his focus from retail payments to rockets and cars in 2000, what Musk seems to have missed is that batch processing of retail payments has been increasingly displaced by real-time processing.
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As for stablecoins and blockchain-based offerings, they too may find it useful to be integrated into 24/7 central bank instant payments systems. For instance, if a DeFi speculator wants to move $10,000 from their bank into a stablecoin at 11PM on Saturday evening in order to take advantage of a fleeting DeFi arbitrage opportunity, and then move the funds back into their bank account by 11:01 PM, central bank instant payments systems can make this possible.
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JPMorgan Chase has more than 300 AI use cases in production, spanning across marketing, customer experience, risk management, and fraud prevention.
From How Banks and FIs Can Approach ChatGPT and Generative AI:
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The pace of innovation for generative AI has been breathtaking, but there are notable risks, such as hallucinations and security. This is why banks need to take a thoughtful approach to this important technology. Rushing into it would likely be a mistake. Rather, a good strategy is to start on applications of generative AI for internal purposes that do not use sensitive data.
From How Banks and FIs Can Approach ChatGPT and Generative AI:
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The IMF’s proposal to create “XC,” a global centralized ledger for cross-border payments, isn’t bad but doesn’t propose anything new and suggests a more expansive role for the IMF.
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Why not just create an SDR “stablecoin” ?
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BloombergGPT outperforms similarly-sized open models on financial NLP tasks by significant margins — without sacrificing performance on general LLM benchmark
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Whoever hacked my identity, it makes sense that they started with my credit card. That explained why they decided to SIM swap my phone in the first place — so they could intercept the fraud alerts and use my card with impunity. And because they stole my card out of the mail, they had my address, which made it easy to gin up a fake ID to show Verizon. Once they were in control of my phone number, it was just a race against time to swing by the Apple store and Gucci and Psycho Bunny before I discovered the hack and blocked their access to my accounts.
It’s also clear that my identity theft was made possible, in no small part, by the very companies and officials who were supposed to prevent it. Verizon accepted a fake ID, and then refused to assist me by confirming that the attack had taken place. Chase tried to charge me for $10,000 in purchases I never made. The police were too overwhelmed to investigate. Gucci couldn’t even be bothered to provide me with a phone number for one of its stores. The hacker might have committed the crime, but corporate America was an accessory after the fact.
From Hacker Stole My Phone, Credit Card, Identity. I Set Out to Find Them.:
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But when I spoke with an officer on the Columbus fraud squad, he asked me whether any money had been stolen from my bank account, or whether my credit-card company was holding me liable for the $10,000. No, I told him. Chase had agreed to reverse all the charges.
The officer was quiet for a beat. “Yeah,” he said, “we’re not going to investigate that.”
The squad, which has only five officers, gets 7,000 reports of fraud a year. If I hadn’t lost any money, the officer told me, it wasn’t worth their time.
From Hacker Stole My Phone, Credit Card, Identity. I Set Out to Find Them.:
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A certain breed of retail investors piled their money into crypto for its anti-establishment qualities. Avoiding big banks or hidebound regulators sweetened the taste of uncanny returns. Crypto firms stoked that sentiment, pulling in investor money by promising a world of “unparalleled economic freedom,” as Celsius Network put it, or to make “crypto for all” a reality, in the words of Voyager Digital.
But now millions of crypto fans—and their money—find themselves trapped in a different kind of reality. Companies they trusted with their cryptocurrency have failed, and their assets are stuck in bankruptcy court, one of the most establishment and bureaucratic institutions in America. How much money the investors lose will be set by judges enforcing complex rules written long before the first crypto coin was minted.
From Celsius, Voyager Creditors Battle Bankruptcy Bureaucracy – Bloomberg:
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It’s inaccurate to call what PayPal or Square offer a “checking account.” The accounts are more like reconfigured mashups of features and functionality from separate financial products. CashApp, for example, provides crypto and tax prep capabilities built into the account—features typically not found in most checking accounts.
From PayPal Chime New Checking Accounts Bank of America Wells Fargo:
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