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Overall, consumers trust PayPal to store their money in an app more than they trust their bank to store their money in an app. There are nevertheless some consumers who trust their banks more: the consumers who have either never stored their money in an app, or who have only stored their money in a merchant app. After PayPal and their banks, consumers most trust Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Amazon and American Express, in that order.

From Money-Storing Apps Grow With Consumers’ Embrace | PYMNTS.com:

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The Digital Markets Act was drafted to address this need. It features a list of “dos and don’ts” aimed at preventing so-called gatekeeper platforms from abusing their position in digital markets, and enabling some space for new entrants to compete with incumbents on their merits.

From Tearing Down Big Tech’s Walls by Margrethe Vestager – Project Syndicate:

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The widespread use of digital veils — AI interface + augmented reality (as in the TV series Years and Years). Facial recognition has become meaningless

From Artificial intelligence in 2040 — The Information Forum:

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But faced with the tech future arriving on fast-forward, policymakers and strategists have increasingly been resorting to science fiction writers to help them imagine what is accelerating towards us. The latest example is Britain’s Ministry of Defence, which commissioned PW Singer and August Cole to write eight short stories about future warfare. The US, Canadian, Australian and French militaries have also conducted similar literary exercises, creating a demand for “fictional intelligence”.

From ‘Fictional intelligence’ can blind us to real-world dangers | Financial Times:

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The first, best articulated by the late Ursula Le Guin, is that science fiction is descriptive more than predictive. Science fiction writers construct literary “lies” that simply reflect the dreams, fears and experiences of their own times. “All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent telling lies,” she wrote in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness.

The second challenge is that by focusing on remote future scenarios we distract ourselves from the more pressing, and often overlooked, threats of today.

From ‘Fictional intelligence’ can blind us to real-world dangers | Financial Times:

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But Singer accepts that many military failures, such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the terrorist attacks on the US in 2001, were predictable, but largely ignored due to a lack of attention. Far from being unimaginable “black swan” events, these were big, obvious and ugly “grey rhino” events.

From ‘Fictional intelligence’ can blind us to real-world dangers | Financial Times:

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Payment service provider Worldline has launched a shopping mall as a white-label solution in Decentraland to enable all-industry companies worldwide to enter the metaverse.

Looking to help merchants, banks, and service providers to create an initial presence in the metaverse, Worldline launched the shopping mall on 8 March with 9 stores having already joined, including Germany-based direct bank Consorsbank, Switzerland-based luxury hotel The Chedi Andermatt, and Australia-based non-alcoholic spirits brand Naked Life.

From Worldline enables companies to enter the metaverse – ThePaypers:

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The starter package includes a multitude of features targeting metaverse newcomers, providing store tenants with the Worldline payment function, with or without cryptocurrencies, and a set of advertising services. Stores and products are assisted with achieving increased visibility and creating ‘innovative’ customer experience through means of optional add-on packages such as target advertising, phygital products and augmented reality, provided through partnerships with 42Meta (target advertising), Metyis (phygital products) and Threedium (augmented reality).

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Morgan Ricks, a professor at the Vanderbilt Law School and a former Treasury official, was quoted in the Financial Times as saying that “there’s nothing inherently dodgy about stablecoins. But there is something inherently dodgy about banking, which is why countries build elaborate regulatory regimes to protect deposits”.

From Locking The Stablecoin Door After The Horse Has Spent All Of The Crypto On Carrots And Then Vanished Over The Fence:

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Account Abstraction (AA) aims to use smart contracts to execute crypto transactions, by creating certain validity rules. With AA, users won’t need to sign off on every transaction with one’s private keys.

From Ethereum Account Abstraction Could Make It Harder to Lose All Your Crypto:

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On Ethereum, users have the ability to create two types of accounts: External Owned Accounts (EOA) and Contract Accounts (CA). The two account types differ in terms of how they initiate transactions over Ethereum’s network.

EOA’s, the typical account-type for Ethereum users, are the type of account you use if you have used a wallet provider such as MetaMask and Coinbase Wallet.

With an EOA, users are given a pair of keys: a public and a private key. Anyone can send funds to an EOA using its public key. But only the account’s owner – whoever has access to the account’s private key, which should be kept secret – can actually initiate transactions from the account.

CAs, better known as “smart contracts,” are like mini computer programs that live on the Ethereum network. These accounts are controlled by code – not private keys – but they cannot initiate transactions themselves; an EOA needs to send a transaction (which you can think of like a message or instruction) to a CA in order for it to make transactions of its own.

On Ethereum, users have the ability to create two types of accounts: External Owned Accounts (EOA) and Contract Accounts (CA). The two account types differ in terms of how they initiate transactions over Ethereum’s network.

EOA’s, the typical account-type for Ethereum users, are the type of account you use if you have used a wallet provider such as MetaMask and Coinbase Wallet.

With an EOA, users are given a pair of keys: a public and a private key. Anyone can send funds to an EOA using its public key. But only the account’s owner – whoever has access to the account’s private key, which should be kept secret – can actually initiate transactions from the account.

CAs, better known as “smart contracts,” are like mini computer programs that live on the Ethereum network. These accounts are controlled by code – not private keys – but they cannot initiate transactions themselves; an EOA needs to send a transaction (which you can think of like a message or instruction) to a CA in order for it to make transactions of its own.

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Ethereum supports push payments but doesn’t natively support pull payments – auto payments are an example of pull payments.

From Visa Crypto Thought Leadership – Auto Payments | Visa:

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Mercedes already has its own Mercedes Pay system that allows users to purchase items or services from the car, but now the automaker has teamed up with Visa to make the process easier and more widely available via the new feature Mercedes Pay+. Instead of having to key in a pin or use a phone, all that’s required for authentication is a fingerprint scan. Models available with fingerprint sensors include the EQS and EQE electric vehicles, as well as the S-Class, GLC-Class, and C-Class.

At present, Mercedes Pay+ can be used to pay for various digital services like improved navigation features or remote connectivity, as well as on-demand vehicle hardware upgrades like rear axle steering with a larger steering angle. Eventually, payments will be expanded to other car-related services, such as fueling, Mercedes said.

From Make payments from your Mercedes with just a fingerprint:

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The users of the platform will use a unique identification and wallet service, denominated “Multi Magic Passport,” that will allow them to make payments and to move their personal data, including avatar status, items, and NFTs (non-fungible tokens), between these metaverses.

From Japan Metaverse Economic Zone:

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one of the other goals of the regulation—to establish a market for data and facilitate data exchange between companies—has not been reached to date.

This lack of action has led to the potential for further regulatory activity to define an agenda for how to uplift the data capabilities of European companies, create a market for data, and regulate activities around AI. These activities are typically summarized as the EU digital strategy.

From The EU digital strategy: The impact of data privacy on global business | McKinsey.

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