Snippings

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Three-quarters of a million South Koreans already have a blockchain-based mDL on their phones, as of 30 November, after signing up in the first few months of the scheme originally piloted in January 2022. The Digital Safety division expects registrations to accelerate as awareness of the credential and its benefits grow.
Anyone passing their test for the first time now can choose to go digital only, or take the traditional route with the plastic card with an IC chip. The photocard license is the first step for them and all other Koreans in acquiring digital ID.

From South Korea’s digital identity blockchain prepares to add new credentials, go international | Biometric Update.

I love how a smart card is now seen as the “traditional” option! Got to say that makes me feel old as the hills. 

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The arrest of Avraham Eisenberg in Puerto Rico after being charged with commodities fraud and manipulation by prosecutors in New York is interesting for the precedent it could set on how DeFi markets operate. Back in October, Eisenberg managed to push the price of the platform’s token MNGO up by 4,400% in 10 minutes mainly by selling to himself, and used that increase to take out MNGO-collateralized loans, eventually draining $116 million – almost all the available liquidity – from the platform. Soon after, Eisenberg confessed on Twitter to the “highly profitable trading strategy”, stressing that what he did was not illegal in that the platform worked as designed. To demonstrate that he wished the platform no harm, he returned $67 million of his profits. That the US Attorney’s Office sees his trades as a crime puts the “code is law” mantra in the spotlight for DeFi platform designers and users alike.

From Wednesday, Dec 28, 2022 – by Noelle Acheson.

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It’s been an interesting year, to say the least, so now it’s coming to an end I can’t help but look back over an incredibly volatile period. Fintech is here to stay, but it has been a bumpy ride for some. Valuations are collapsing, frauds are rampant and there have been events. Serious events, ranging from war in Europe to COVID to weather. A lot of events, dear readers, events.

(When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was asked might most influence the future of his government in 1957, he famously replied “events, dear boy, events.)

Whether looking back on the wreckage of the market is any value or not I couldn’t say, but this seems to be the sort of thing that people do at the end of the year. So here goes… here are my top 10 Forbes contributions of the year, ranked according to you, the readers…

First, Apple Moves Into Open Banking concerning Apple’s purchase of a UK open banking company and the potential to bypass a lot of the current payments infrastructure by going directly to bank accounts.

Follow The Yellow BRIC Road looking at the potential for international trade without dollars.

What The Zelle Is Going On? concerning the use of Zelle for retail payments – but not in America!

Super Apps or Smart Wallets explaining why I think in Western markets the smart wallet approach would be better. I still feel that smart wallets (shared strong authentication) are a better choice than super apps (shared identity) but hey Elon Musk is a billionaire and I’m not so you should probably listen to him.

From Apple Pay To Apple Paid talking about Apple’s decision to turn iPhones into point-of-sale terminals. Of course you could already accept contactless payments on Android phones but Apple’s market entrance legitimises the sector as it always does. Phone-on-phone action ahoy!

When The CBDC Revolution Comes, It Won’t Be On The Blockchain commenting on early work in the field and expressing my scepticism that blockchains will be used for population-scale central bank digital currency. I remain firmly of the conviction that device-to-device transfer of balances stored in tamper-resistant hardware will be the chosen architecture.

If The Crypto Crash Is Another Tulip Bubble That Is Really Good News which takes a historical perspective to suggest that the regulatory response to the crypto winter, if intelligent, could be of benefit to all of us (ie, not only crypto “investors”).

How Do You Measure Open Banking putting forward my view that open banking is already changing the world of financial services and that the lack of account switching is not, an never has been, a useful measure of impact.

ChatGPT Is A Window Into The Real Future Of Financial Services reinforcing my view that revolution in financial services comes when customers get AI, not when banks do.

And finally, coming in at no.10, was New Ledgers, New Business Models And New Opportunities In Micropayments. In the face of all evidence to date, I really do think that a workable micropayments infrastructure (maybe the destiny of the new Twitter?) will enable new kinds of business.

As for next year, I won’t be making any fintech predictions. Well, not beyond the obvious ones, anyway…

First of all, I and certain that many people in business continue to underestimate the impact of AI. We are seeing astonishing new tools being built on top of Chat GPT and such like. The bot revolution is coming faster than I had anticipated. 

Second, I’m confident that a digital assets phoenix will arise from the flames of crypto.

And finally, I’m fairly sure that the core strategies for most of the businesses that I work with will focus on embedded finance. I rather liked Simon Taylor’s view of this sector as delivering regulated financial products to point of need and I think that a great many customer-facing enterprises will exploit this.

Well, that’s that. I’m off to put my feet up and enjoy playing Dungeons & Dragons, watching Woking FC and eating too much for the weekend. See you on the other side.

By the way, if you like the cartoons that the brilliant Helen Holmes draws for my Forbes columns, please let me know. I will send a physical copy of one of those cartoons, signed by the author herself, to the first person to respond to this post here on LinkedIn!

Thanks to everyone for their kind words in response to my meagre scribblings and onwards to a great 2023!

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n alternative future for crypto is that it will be absorbed into the existing financial system so completely that in 20 years’ time people will have forgotten that it ever existed separately. After all,  we’ve only recently discovered that dinosaurs still exist in the form of birds, and that Neanderthals live on in the DNA of modern humans. Similarly, crypto could, by disappearing from view, fundamentally change the future of finance.

From From bank vaults to the crypt – The Mint Magazine.

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ECB holds open the possibility that offline peer-to-peer payments could be recorded independently of any such ledger, writing that “settlement in a local storage device would be a suitable solution.”

From ECB Outlines Banks’ Role in CBDC Project | PYMNTS.com.

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The auditor of FTX’s bankrupt US exchange business said it stood by its work for Sam Bankman-Fried and was proud of having provided services for a cryptocurrency industry that needed to improve trust and transparency, but it would ditch its digital assets practice by the end of next month.

From FTX’s US auditor Armanino defends work for failed crypto exchange | Financial Times.

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TikTok’s parent company ByteDance said Thursday it had fired four employees after an internal investigation found they had accessed data on two journalists and other U.S. users while attempting to track down a company leak, a revelation that could further inflame doubts in Washington over the company’s Chinese roots.

From TikTok admits its workers accessed journalists’ data; 4 fired – The Washington Post:

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This is why, just as it is none of Twitter’s business who you are, it’s none of Tik Tok’s business either.

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Widely recognised as a pioneer of data privacy as a result of GDPR, the European Commission announced new measures that came into effect in June 2022 and will apply in full from September 2023.

The Data Governance Act (DGA) acknowledges that data-driven innovation will deliver significant benefit to its citizens and the economy and looks to ensure equitable access to data while ensuring “data portability and interoperability, and avoiding lock-in effects.”

To facilitate this, the DGA outlines a new category of service provider – a Data Intermediary – that has a fiduciary duty to act in the interests of data subjects

From The carrot and stick of data privacy. Which one will you choose in 2023?:

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the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre’s (AUSTRAC – the Australian government’s financial intelligence agency) customer identification procedure does not require organisations to copy documents. The guidance is clear “you don’t have to copy documents (for example you can record details of a driver’s licence or passport rather than photocopying them)”.

From The carrot and stick of data privacy. Which one will you choose in 2023?:

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My wife just failed the KYC check for a savings account in the U.K. because her driving licence had expressed the month previously (which, of course, she had no idea about since like more normal people she has never looked at the expiry date on a driving licence) and so could not open the account. I was tempted to call the bank and ask them why they needed the driving licence at all, since she already has accounts with U.K. financial institutions and why her ability to drive had anything to do with her ability to save.

In a sane world, the savings bank would have bounced her via open banking to her current account holder and paid a small interchange fee to obtain a cryptographic proof that my wife is resident in the U.K., is over 18 and has been KYC’d already.

Single Euro Payments Area (

) Payment Account Access (

) is the newest European Payments Council (

) scheme. 

covers messaging functionalities allowing the exchange of payment accounts-related data and facilitating the initiation of payment transactions in the context of ‘premium1’ services provided by asset holders to asset brokers.

What are the main benefits of the
scheme?

Arturo: Some of the key benefits of the
scheme:

It builds on investments done in the context of the
.

It is managed as a scheme developed collaboratively by the retail payment industry (supply and demand) and the end-user community as represented by the Euro Retail Payments Board (
), and with the support of the
institutions.

From SEPA Payment Account Access scheme: going beyond open banking | European Payments Council:

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