Snippings

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At the start of this year, a video popped up on social media sites in India showing the chief executive of the Bombay Stock Exchange, Sundararaman Ramamurthy, giving investors advice on which stocks to buy.
Viewers were promised handsome returns if they heeded his advice.
The only problem was, it was not Ramamurthy speaking. It was a deepfake video of him, made using artificial intelligence.

From: Deepfake attack: ‘Many people could have been cheated’ – BBC News.

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The level of uncertainty about AI’s economic effects is so high—and the quality and supply of real-world, real-time information about its economic effects so paltry—that even serious conversations about AI from otherwise analytical people often veer toward the genre of fiction rather than the category of empirical analysis. AI land is so full of science fiction precisely because the space is so bereft of official high-quality data.

From: Nobody Knows Anything – Derek Thompson.

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And, while cash is still accepted by 77% of small and medium sized retailers, some 14% have gone cashless in just the last year.

A recent inquiry by the Treasury Select Committee into cash acceptance warned that without action, the UK risks creating a two-tier high street, where some customers are effectively shut out of shops, cafés, and local services because they cannot pay digitally.

The biggest driver to becoming a ‘cashless’ business is fraud prevention (22%) followed by security concerns (21%) and lack of customer demand (20%). One-fifth (19%) also highlight that digital payments made bookkeeping and accounting much easier to manage. A lack of deposit facilities (13%) and the closure of the local bank branch (11%) is also cited.

From: One in seven UK high street shops went cashless in last year – survey.

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“In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed. I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording.”

From: Meta’s AI Smart Glasses and Data Privacy Concerns: Workers Say “We See Everything”.

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Oh, and as a final point… this piece was largely drafted by AI, executing an extensive prompt laying out the arguments we wanted to make and examples we wanted to use in one iteration, with only slight tweaks and edits required afterwards. While analysts will remain the source of ideation and need to write their thoughts in the form of a comprehensive prompt, AI is enabling better and faster execution.

From: AI disruption, wage deflation, research abundance.

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Revenues jumped to £4.5bn last year from £3.1bn in 2024.

The results are the latest sign of Revolut’s improving fortunes after the $75bn fintech this month clinched a full UK banking licence after a four-year-long tussle with UK regulators.

Founder and chief executive Nik Storonsky had said the accreditation was Revolut’s “number-one priority”, arguing that the licence will be key to its growth.

The licence will allow it to lend at scale in the UK and push into lucrative markets dominated by traditional banks. Finance chief Victor Stinga said on a media call that credit cards and overdrafts would be the first products to be launched for UK consumers now that Revolut had secured the permit.

Tuesday’s results showed that the company’s performance was underpinned by a rise in customer numbers to 68.3mn, up from 52.5mn the previous year.

The higher market share boosted Revolut’s fees from card payments as well as the interest earned on deposits, two important profit engines.

Fees from card payments rose 45 per cent to £1bn while interest income climbed 23 per cent to £974mn. Revolut also generated £708mn from customer subscriptions in 2025, up 67 per cent.

Revolut charges monthly fees for premium tiers that give users perks such as higher interest on savings, travel insurance and fewer fees on currency exchanges.

Revolut’s wealth business, which includes revenues from users trading digital assets, has become a cornerstone of its business model, and helped lift the group to its first profit in 2021. However, the division was among Revolut’s slowest-growing business lines, increasing revenues by 31 per cent to £663mn following a slump in major cryptocurrencies.

From: Revolut profits surge to record £1.7bn as it wins more customers.

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Kimberly Sutherland, global head of fraud and identity at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, said financial institutions have tools to detect fraud patterns and understand the behavior of their customers.

From: True crime, fake romance: Inside one victim’s fight with banks | American Banker.

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Banking experts welcomed the White House’s decision to delay a proposal that would have required banks to collect citizenship information from customers.

From: Experts celebrate White House reversal on bank citizenship EO | American Banker.

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Requiring additional checks for citizenship will debank our millions of Americans who don’t possess the documents necessary to prove citizenship, or whose name or address conflicts with their most recent paperwork. How do you prove your citizenship? Only half of Americans have passports. Passports are quite unevenly distributed across America: Eight out of 10 New Yorkers have one, but only two out of 10 West Virginians do. Ironically, the 10 states with the lowest passport rates (37% or below) all voted for Trump the last three elections.

From: Trump should scrap his plan to make bank customers prove citizenship | American Banker.

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Well, exciting times in the British payments cards industry. The forward-looking and innovative people at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) have responded to the Chancellor of the Exchquer’s “red tape bonfire” to stimulate economic growth by removing the £100 limit on contactless transactions at retail point-of-sale (POS).

The banks have, by and large, yawned and ignored the change. Customer aren’t asking for the change and  UK Finance, the industry body, says “there is no demand or need” to increase the £100 cap. People who want to spend more than £100 are, it seems, entirely happy to insert the card and punch in a PIN.

Or at least those who can remember it are. On my last visit to Las Vegas, I was with a colleague in a taxi to our hotel. When the taxi pulled up, my colleague held up an iPhone to card terminal in the back of the taxi. Nothing. The driver said that he didn’t take contactless and that we had to insert or swipe a card. My colleague rummaged around for a card and put it in terminal, but then couldn’t remember the PIN and had no memory of actually putting it in a terminal ever.)

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New Barclays Consumer Spend data just released shows a record 94.6% of all eligible in-store card transactions were made using contactless in 2024. The 2023 figure was 93.4%, and shoppers used also the technology more frequently last year – 236 times on average, in fact.

The cost of the average purchase also went up ro £16.10 (vs. £15.69 in 2023). This equates to total average contactless spend of £3,803 per person in 2024, up from £3,623 in 2023.

For the fourth consecutive year, the over 65s were the fastest growing group of users, with 84.1% currently using this method. Convenience continued to drive uptake, as over two thirds (67%) of those aged 61-79 agree that contactless payments are easier than chip and PIN transactions.

From: Barclays data shows contactless spending broke a new record in 2024 | Convenience Store.

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And, while cash is still accepted by 77% of small and medium sized retailers, some 14% have gone cashless in just the last year.

A recent inquiry by the Treasury Select Committee into cash acceptance warned that without action, the UK risks creating a two-tier high street, where some customers are effectively shut out of shops, cafés, and local services because they cannot pay digitally.

The biggest driver to becoming a ‘cashless’ business is fraud prevention (22%) followed by security concerns (21%) and lack of customer demand (20%). One-fifth (19%) also highlight that digital payments made bookkeeping and accounting much easier to manage. A lack of deposit facilities (13%) and the closure of the local bank branch (11%) is also cited.

From: One in seven UK high street shops went cashless in last year – survey.

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I think this is more evidence that the end of the plastic card era is in sight. When cards went through middle age they bought the sports car of tokenisation and made some younger friends (Apple Pay and GooglePay). But now, as cards approach their golden years, the prospect of retirement is real. I am hardly the only digital payments enthusiast that thinks this, by the way. Some years ago, I saw Anthony Jenkins (the former CEO of Barclays) give  talk at a UK product launch in which he predicted that mobile phones were going to replace cards long before they replaced cash, a view that was later reinforced in Deutsche Bank Research’s study on the future of payments. I agreed with them back then, of course, but there still remains the questions as to what payments will we use those mobile phones for? Instant credit transfers or digital currency? Request-to-pay and Libra transfer or WeChat message with digital Yuan inside? Bank credit transfers or AmazonAMZN-1.6% credit transfers?

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A rogue AI agent recently triggered a major security alert at Meta Platforms, by taking action without approval that led to the exposure of sensitive company and user data to Meta employees who didn’t have authorization to access the data.

From: Inside Meta, a Rogue AI Agent Triggers Security Alert — The Information.

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