Snippings

Oh wow. It looks as if the Fed read my Forbes column. Just a couple of weeks ago and I wrote about national trust bank charters, noting that these does not mean a Federal Reserve Master Account and direct access to the payment system pointing out that lobbying around this has already started (with Ripple, for one example, applying for a Fed Master Account via its New York trust licence) and observing that such access would be good for competition and innovation.

Only three days later, I see that at the Fed’s first Payments Innovation Conference, Governor Waller began talking about Fed Payment Account (a “skinny” account) that would provide access to the Fed payment rails but, unlike a Master Account, would not pay interest on balances or provide other banking services. This would indeed benefit challengers and I think that is should be brought in as soon as possible.

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The Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack may have been ‘the single most financially damaging’ incident of its kind to ever hit Britain, new research suggests.

The JLR cyberattack started in late August and prompted an IT shutdown and a halt in global manufacturing operations, including at the firm’s major British plants at Solihull, Halewood, and Wolverhampton.

Dealer systems were intermittently unavailable, and suppliers faced cancelled or delayed orders, with uncertainty about future supply.

The Cyber Monitoring Centre estimates the financial impact of the JLR cyberattack reached £1.9billion and affected over 5,000 organisations.

From: Jaguar Land Rover hack cost UK economy £1.9bn, report claims | This is Money.

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hen DynamoDB went down, so did the services built on top of it. That included streaming apps, online games, and even smart devices like Alexa speakers and Ring doorbells.

And because AWS’s Northern Virginia region also handles core management tasks for the platform, the failure spread quickly. Even companies hosting data in other AWS regions still depend on us-east-1 for certain background operations. So, when it hiccups, everyone feels it.

From: How the AWS outage happened — and why it’s breaking the internet | Tom’s Guide.

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A core tension exists between the two objectives of the BSA of making crime more difficult and making criminals easier to detect, capture, and convict. The first pushes criminals out of the formalized banking system by discouraging financial institutions from providing services. The second relies on the provision of financial services by institutions subject to these laws to provide the data necessary for law enforcement to use these tools (Gifford, Barr, and Klein 2018). This tension helps explain why current American law largely allows banks to provide financial services to those suspected of engaging in criminal activity but requires them to report that activity.

From: Payment systems’ changing role from economic growth to the new foreign policy lever | Brookings.

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Chinese tech giants have paused plans to issue stablecoins in Hong Kong, after Beijing raised concerns about the rise of currencies controlled by the private sector.

Companies including Alibaba-backed Ant Group and ecommerce group JD.com had said over the summer they would participate in Hong Kong’s pilot stablecoin programme or issue virtual asset-backed products, such as tokenised bonds.

But they have since put their stablecoin ambitions on hold after receiving instructions from Chinese regulators, including the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) and Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), not to move ahead, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.

From: Chinese tech giants pause stablecoin plans after Beijing steps in.

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But the heart of Trump’s newfound wealth is a rapidly growing cryptocurrency empire built by the president and his family. According to a Financial Times investigation, this business has already reaped more than $1bn in pre-tax profits over the past year, in part thanks to a crypto boom fuelled by the administration’s own industry-friendly policies.

From: How the Trump companies made $1bn from crypto.

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Walmart has announced AI tools, including generative AI-powered ‘Sparky,’ which is available on its app to assist customers with product suggestions or summarizing product reviews, among other options.
The company’s growing investment in AI is also aimed at closing the gap with online behemoth Amazon, which had a head start with its chatbot, Rufus, a Gen AI-powered shopping assistant that answers various shopping queries.
Walmart’s tie-up with the ChatGPT-maker follows a similar partnership OpenAI announced last month with Etsy and Shopify (SHOP.TO), opens new tab.
About 15% of total referral traffic for Walmart in September was from ChatGPT, up from 9.5% in August, data from SimilarWeb showed.

From: Walmart partners with OpenAI for ChatGPT shopping feature | Reuters.

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Commercial banks will then have an important, useful and distinct function in society as the vaults that look after identity, not money. I wasn’t the first person to say that identity is the new money, although I may have been the most persistent and annoying, but as time passes it seems to be a more and more accurate description of the future. I imagine that most forward-looking banks already have a digital identity strategy in place and are already developing new products and services to take advantage of this new era, but for those who don’t I’ll post a few ideas on the topic here.

From: Digital != crypto != virtual – by David G.W. Birch.

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Romance scams drained £108 million from unsuspecting Brits in 2024, according to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which is now urging banks and payment firms to step up their efforts to protect customers. These scams, which rose 9% last year, see fraudsters weaving false romantic or friendly connections—often through dating apps and social media—to manipulate victims into sending money. In one shocking case, a victim lost more than £428,000; another made over 400 payments to a scammer, parting with £72,000 before the deceit was uncovered.

From: Love’s Costly Con – Payments:Unpacked.

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German researchers have discovered unknown persons are using bitcoin’s blockchain to store and link to child abuse imagery, potentially putting the cryptocurrency in jeopardy.

From: Child abuse imagery found within bitcoin’s blockchain | Bitcoin | The Guardian.

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