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Safaricom Ethiopia will lead the rollout of Ethiopia’s national digital identity registration across seven regions under a new partnership with the National ID Program and Africom Technologies.

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The agreement covers Lots 3 and 4 of the National Fayda Digital ID Registration Project and assigns the consortium responsibility for enrolling residents in Afar, Amhara, Tigray, Sidama, South West Ethiopia, Central Ethiopia and South Ethiopia.
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The rollout expands private sector participation in Ethiopia’s effort to build a nationwide digital identity platform underpinning access to government services, financial products, and other digital transactions.
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For Safaricom Ethiopia, the project extends its ambitions beyond mobile connectivity into the country’s digital public infrastructure, an increasingly important battleground for telecommunications operators seeking new revenue streams as traditional voice and data businesses mature.

From: Safaricom Ethiopia Wins Role in National Digital ID Rollout | The Kenyan Wallstreet.

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Safaricom Ethiopia will lead the rollout of Ethiopia’s national digital identity registration across seven regions under a new partnership with the National ID Program and Africom Technologies.

•
The agreement covers Lots 3 and 4 of the National Fayda Digital ID Registration Project and assigns the consortium responsibility for enrolling residents in Afar, Amhara, Tigray, Sidama, South West Ethiopia, Central Ethiopia and South Ethiopia.
•
The rollout expands private sector participation in Ethiopia’s effort to build a nationwide digital identity platform underpinning access to government services, financial products, and other digital transactions.
•
For Safaricom Ethiopia, the project extends its ambitions beyond mobile connectivity into the country’s digital public infrastructure, an increasingly important battleground for telecommunications operators seeking new revenue streams as traditional voice and data businesses mature.

From: Safaricom Ethiopia Wins Role in National Digital ID Rollout | The Kenyan Wallstreet.

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The European Central bank says it has restored normal operations of its real-time gross settlement system T2 after reporting the second incident in a week, affecting settlement of euros and Danish krone.

From: ECB’s T2 suffers second ‘incident’ as Euronext reports outage – Central Banking.

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The scale of the issue is further underscored in analysis in Revolut’s Clicking with Caution report. It finds that 13.5 million British consumers have been left out of pocket after being scammed, while 19 million have reduced their online spending as a direct consequence. What emerges is not just a fraud problem, but what Revolut describes as a “major threat to consumers and online businesses.”

From: APP fraud back on the rise as £1.3bn stolen.

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DPI unlocks growth through three core mechanisms: eliminating the friction tax, enabling public and private innovation and treating data as productive capital. The UK’s current ‘tenant state’ model, characterised by vendor lock-in and a sovereignty gap, is actively stalling these drivers of growth. Transitioning from a digital tenant to a sovereign owner of these foundational rails offers a multi-billion-pound prize, evidenced by home-grown and international success stories, from the UK’s Open Banking to Estonia’s X-Road and the India Stack.

From: Liberating the tenant state: why digital public infrastructure is critical for growth | Nesta.

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Xiaowei is Tencent’s AI-native digital assistant built directly into WeChat, allowing users to converse naturally with artificial intelligence that can answer questions, organise tasks, access services and increasingly complete transactions across the entire WeChat ecosystem.

It isn’t being plugged into a standalone payment wallet; it is being embedded into one of the richest commerce, payments and behavioural data ecosystems ever assembled. For an AI agent, that context is far more valuable than the payment itself.

In reality Xiaowei meant that, rather than opening a separate chatbot, users simply tap a small green robot icon inside the app and start talking. Xiaowei can answer questions, organise tasks, book restaurants, arrange travel, recommend products and increasingly complete transactions through partners including JD.com, Meituan and Ctrip.

Built using Tencent’s own WeLM large language model alongside reasoning capabilities from DeepSeek, it represents Tencent’s vision of how artificial intelligence should work: invisible, integrated and always available.

This is why Xiaowei deserves attention.

From: WeChat opens the door to the agentic financial future – Chris Skinner’s blog.

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Europe’s top banking watchdogs have warned that frontier AI models such as Anthropic’s Mythos could create “systemic risks to the financial system” as they gave lenders a tight four-month deadline to prepare for greater cyber security threats.

The European Central Bank’s chief financial supervisor Claudia Buch on Tuesday sent a letter to 110 lenders giving them until the end of October to come up with a “comprehensive action plan” to combat the cyber risks posed by state of the art AI models.

In a separate warning, the European Systemic Risk Board said modern AI models could undermine financial stability across the Eurozone as hackers can use them to cheaply automate highly complex attacks, while banks remain bogged down by regulatory requirements, legacy IT systems and slow updates from software providers.

From: Top banking watchdogs issue stark warning over AI-driven cyber attacks.

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The Oura ring is not a fitness tracker in this context. It is the data source that makes a recurring, provider-led commerce relationship possible. The wearable becomes the credential that unlocks the service layer.

I was talking to a VC recently who raised the logical extension of this: what happens when you embed a payment or access link directly into a watch band? Your device knows your health data, your identity, your payment credentials. The watch band becomes the closed-loop credential for whatever environment you are in, a race, a festival, a clinic visit, a pharmacy counter. The Oura-Twentyeight Health partnership is pointing at this, even if payments are not the explicit use case yet.

From: Ilona III: The Missing Layer in Live Event Payments.

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This week, the situation hit a boiling point when the song “Earrings” by Malcolm Todd surged to number one on a Spotify chart. In a series of X posts, Davies outlined his suspected culprit: “botting,” or scammers who purchase bots to juice streaming numbers. Davies argued that prediction market traders were botting the charts to influence the outcome of related events contracts.

From: Spotify Confirms Streaming Fraud After Kalshi Trader Cries Foul | WIRED.

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Banks keep investing in this segment (and nonbanks like Robinhood and Bilt are entering it) because premium cards are highly effective tools for customer acquisition against which you can gather deposits, originate mortgages, and cross-sell trading and wealth management services.

The lifetime economics of these adjacent products dwarf the card itself.

From: The Illusion of Premium Card Profitability | Flagship Advisory Partners.

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