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In June 2018 the Met’s Flying Squad began to investigate an emerging linked series of robberies under Operation Atoll. It included hours of covert surveillance, automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) and extensive analysis of the movement of phones attributed to the offenders to bring them all to justice.

From Gang who carried out ‘violent’ Bedfordshire robbery raids collectively jailed for more than 100 years:

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“We will also make it easy to do crypto,” Musk told employees during an internal Q&A yesterday, a recording of which I obtained. “You should be able to easily send money to anyone in Twitter with one click,” he said. “The payments side of things will probably be more valuable than all the rest of Twitter combined.”

From Twitter will let you send crypto to accounts alongside “normal” money, Elon Musk says. – The Verge:

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Despite the unparalleled growth of fintech start-ups, and the perception of accelerated innovation in the banking marketplace, there is evidence that smaller start-ups are growing much more slowly than comparable firms did in the past and that innovation in financial services has actually slowed.

This is because the largest banks are leveraging proprietary information technology to achieve major gains in efficiencies and to respond to highly heterogeneous demands of consumers and businesses. The result is a widening gap in revenue per employee and a solidification of the dominance of the market leaders … or ‘superstar capitalism’.

The question becomes, should dominant financial institutions be broken up, or should the banking giants be compelled to share technology, data and knowledge as part of open platforms similar to how Amazon has created a separate business with their cloud technology?

From How Big Banks’ Tech Advantage Hinders Innovation and Hurts Competition:

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A top UK National Crime Agency official in the Caribbean has been sacked for gross misconduct.

Annie Norris, who was based at the British High Commission in Barbados, was fired after an inquiry into the sale of a high value ‘covert asset’ used to spy on drug traffickers.

From British anti-narcotics officer Annie Norris SACKED from Barbados posting | Daily Mail Online:

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hana’s government is working on a new policy to buy oil products with gold rather than U.S. dollar reserves, Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia said on Facebook on Thursday.

The move is meant to tackle dwindling foreign currency reserves coupled with demand for dollars by oil importers, which is weakening the local cedi and increasing living costs.

From Ghana plans to buy oil with gold instead of U.S. dollars | Reuters:

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41%
of institutional investors hold cryptocurrency in their portfolios today

15%
additional institutional investors plan to hold digital assets in their portfolios within the next two to five years

91%
of institutional investors are interested in investing in tokenized assets

From Digital Assets Survey | BNY Mellon:

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The Dutch finance ministry has told the Chamber of Commerce to close off a register which allows people to find out who owns companies to outsiders, following a European court ruling.

From EU court orders company ownership register to be closed to the public – DutchNews.nl:

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As Dave Wallace points out, the indirect nature of offsets means that they are often difficult to validate and bad actors can exploit this.  For some form of carbon currency to succeed it must deal with these kinds of issues to build trust. A caron currency needs to be open, transparent and non-discriminatory. It needs to be money

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Beginning in May 2023, individuals in Great Britain will be required to show photographic identification for the first time when voting in polling stations in some elections. This is because the Elections Act 2022, passed in April this year, has introduced the requirement of identification at polling stations for general elections across all of Great Britain, as well as local elections in England and Police and Crime Commissioner elections in both England and Wales.

From No ID? No vote! Voter ID comes to Great Britain | British Politics and Policy at LSE:

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Equally striking is the dominance within the financial technology realm of billion-dollar companies that deal in some way with payments. They account for eight of Fintech Labs’ top 10 — PayPal, Ant, Stripe, Shopify, Adyen, Block (formerly Square), Checkout.com and Afterpay.

From Why Visa and Mastercard have yet to face their Kodak moment | Financial Times.

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