Snippings

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Getting paid in cUSD offered other advantages, too. Participants had the option to easily off-ramp their cUSD earnings to their M-Pesa accounts,

From Pilot Spotlight: How Celo and Mercy Corps Ventures Partnered to Benefit Microworkers in Kenya | by Celo Foundation | The Celo Blog | Feb, 2022 | Medium.

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Fintech on the front line

Apple Pay and Google Pay are suspending support for contactless mobile payments made using Mir cards issued by Russia’s National Payment Card System (NSPK).

From Apple Pay and Google Pay suspend contactless mobile payments for Mir cardholders in Russia • NFCW.

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Nevertheless, this acquisition may emerge as one of the most critical inflection points for Open banking and Open Finance, given Apple’s possibilities and potentials at its disposal with Credit Kudos. With the privacy-preserving techniques that Apple seems to have perfected over the years – at least in customers’ minds – it can boost consumer confidence for Open Banking. It may also help increase acceptance among the masses for the consent-driven data sharing mechanisms to access better financial and lifestyle products.

From Apple Opens Up To Open Banking:

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In addition to holding an AISP (Account Information Service Provider) license, they are also an FCA-regulated credit reference agency. And that gives them access to both open banking data and the credit data from banks that other traditional credit bureaus have access to. Being an AISP, Credit Kudos is also authorized to access an individual’s or SME’s bank account data from their financial institutions with their explicit consent. Credit Kudos is also registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office as a Data Controller and is compliant with the UK’s Data Protection Act and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.

From Apple Opens Up To Open Banking:

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‘The idiots tried to use the Era cryptophones in Kharkiv, after destroying many 3g cell towers and also replacing others with stingrays. Era needs 3g/4g to communicate.’

‘In the phone call in which the FSB officer assigned to the 41st Army reports the death to his boss in Tula, he says they’ve lost all secure communications.

From Russian military phone calls hacked after 3G goes offline:

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Professor Eswar Prasad, writing in the MIT Technology Review on the future of money, says that “Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that started it all, may not have much of. Role to play in this monetary future”. This is because stablecoins of one form or another might well be more desirable to the average person than volatile tokens for speculators.`In his view, rather than leading to a proliferation of public and private currencies that compete on a level playing field, the emergence of digital currency could make economic power more concentrated than ever. If major currencies such as the dollar, the euro and renminbi are available to citizens around the world, they might well displace the currencies of many other nations. Similarly, and in my view just as likely, the digital currencies issued by multi-national corporations might replace weak fiat currencies by exploiting their ecosystems.

The fact is that most people around the world still want to hold dollars, given that the dollar is the global reserve currency, while few people have a desire to hold yuan (and no one wants to hold rubles). The war in Ukraine and the consequent sanctions applied by the West have once again raised the issue of the US Dollar’s global dominance and the extent to which this benefits America both financially, because of the increased demand for dollars, and politically. The historian Niall Ferguson, a thorough scholar of the history of money, has called the soft power obtained through the dollar’s dominance “more valuable than boots on the ground”.

As N.S. Lyons writes, China must be looking at the West’s use of currency as a weapon against Russia with some alarm. Benjamin Cohen, a veteran academic of international monetary relations, said in the Financial Times that there was “no question” sanctions against Russia would further incentivise countries such as Iran, North Korea and Venezuela to diversify away from the dollar.

Barry Eichengreen (professor of economics and political science at the University of California, Berkeley) wrote about this, pointing out that while the share of dollars in global identified foreign exchange reserves has been falling for a generation (it is now under 60% when it used to be over 70%), diversification has not been towards the euro, sterling and yen, the other longstanding constituents of the IMF’s special drawing rights (SDR) basket. In fact, while a quarter of the shift has been towards China’s renminbi, three-quarters has been into the currencies of smaller economies such as Canada, Australia, Sweden, South Korea and Singapore.

(You will remember that Singapore’s dollar was one of the currencies in the reserve basket proposed by Facebook for its Libra digital currency.)

Around the world people are already using tokenised versions of the US dollar.

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Typically, a bond issuer sends the money to a correspondent bank or common depository, which is set up to receive deposits and make payments for a parent bank in a foreign country. The funds then go to a payment agent, which is appointed by the issuer to distribute the money around the market. The money then passes through the correspondent bank of a securities depository. Arrival at the latter allows deals to be reconciled and recorded, and assets are then transferred between customer accounts.

Depositories like Euroclear and Clearstream are a vital part of the financial markets as they hold €50tn of assets on behalf of investors.

From Russia sanctions snarl global financial system in legal wrangling | Financial Times:

You can see why the idea of a smart contract automatically sending stablecoin from the bond issuer’s wallet to the bond holder’s wallet is so appealing.

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And the broader issue of using bitcoin as legal tender is increasingly unpopular in El Salvador, where few people are using it and few businesses are accepting it.

Nor is it used for remittances, with Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Grafica reporting that less than $20 million had been sent that way through February, out of total of $1.125 billion. It added that the amount sent via that route — which is far cheaper than traditional cross-border payments rails — has been declining monthly.

From El Salvador President’s Twitter Battles | PYMNTS.com:

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“For the food industry, this coin supply disruption affects a grocer’s ability to complete cash transactions because they lack sufficient coin to make change at check out. This significantly limits the ability of millions of cash-reliant and cash-preferring grocery customers to buy necessary goods and services,” said Christine Pollack, vice president, government relations, FMI, and a U.S. Coin Task Force member.

From Retail associations call on Treasury to help with coin circulation – Financial Regulation News:

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How quaint

 

Why don’t they just give up with coins and start rounding at point-of-sale (POS) instead?

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“Crossing the border from Ukraine into Poland at Zosin, there was a lot of help on offer — free food, free diapers,” one Ukrainian refugee told POLITICO. “But nobody willing to exchange cash.”

From Chartbook #103 How refugees’ need for cash exposes the limits of Euro sovereignty:

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Nascent EU efforts to ensure Ukrainian refugees can exchange their savings into euros will likely result in fiscal authorities offering a backstop to the European Central Bank guaranteeing payments, three officials told POLITICO Friday.

Refugees who had emptied their bank accounts before fleeing are either being charged exorbitant exchange rates up to 90 percent higher than before the war or are facing flat refusals.

From EU to provide guarantees on Ukrainians’ savings – POLITICO:

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