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Read this 1970 Wharton paper excerpt below. Can banks retain a role? Not in the DeFi, or Web 3.0 world.

“Financial institutions exist to improve the efficiency of the financial markets. If savers and investors, buyers and sellers, could locate each other efficiently, purchase any and all assets costlessly, and make their decisions with freely available perfect information, then financial institutions would have little scope for replacing or mediating direct transactions. However, this is not the real world. In actual economies, market participants seek the services of financial institutions because of the latter’s ability to provide market knowledge, transaction efficiency, and contract enforcement.?
While there is no near term threat, the nature of banking competition is changing from economies of scale (asset intensity) to information intensity (see blog) and value orchestration.

From Evolution of V/MA – Moving Beyond Card – Noyes Payments Blog.

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But oftentimes, the use of AI is a prospective tool that processes data in near or real-time. A recent paper in Science examines the value of new data analysis of past publications as a key tool in extracting added value from these scientific papers.

This suggests that latent knowledge regarding future discoveries is to a large extent embedded in past publications. Our findings highlight the possibility of extracting knowledge and relationships from the massive body of scientific literature in a collective manner, and point towards a generalized approach to the mining of scientific literature.

The last sentence is most interesting–mining of scientific literature! Using this methodology, the authors were able to predict the development of a key thermodynamic material from papers published years before the actual discovery.

From Is Data the New Resource That Must Be Recycled? | Psychology Today.

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Recycling is the responsible thing to do. It can make functional, economic, and environmental sense. It seems that discarding data may be a similar situation.

From Is Data the New Resource That Must Be Recycled? | Psychology Today.

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As Alastair Johnson wrote here in Forbes a couple of year ago,  merging payments and ID gives the industry a means to solve a number of significant problems in the payments sector as well as opening up the doors to a major new wave of innovation.

From 5 Reasons Why Payments And ID Need To Merge.

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Apple Pay, the mobile wallet launched by Apple in 2014, has quickly become the universal mobile wallet of choice for smartphone users in the United States. As of 2022, it far outpaces the market share and user base of competitors like Google Pay and Samsung Pay.

From Apple Pay: Which Retailers Accept it in 2022?   – PaymentsJournal.

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Apple Pay is the top mobile payment player in the United States, with 43.9 million users in 2021. In comparison, Google Pay and Samsung Pay had 25 million and 16.3 million users, respectively.

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Investors and techies who made early bets on crypto are now hailed as revolutionary financial prophets and gilded with the allure of sudden wealth — often flaunted through a conspicuous-consumption culture of “Lambos,” yacht parties, aggressive boostering, million-dollar profile pictures, and crypto-branded everything.

In the process, some have become prime targets for opportunistic criminals.

From Crypto and NFT Owners Targeted in Kidnappings, Home Invasions, Robberies.

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Apple’s vice president of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet Jennifer Bailey was quoted as saying that the service “will provide businesses with a secure, private, and easy way to accept contactless payments”.

There was a very interesting and informative web discussion around this topic recently. The panelists were

• John Howells, CEO of LINK, who presented new research on the use of cash and digital payments in the UK and Europe, and the risks to inclusion.
• Ruth Wandhӧfer, Chair of the PSR Panel, gave insights into the barriers to the take-up of digital payments and the direction needed to ensure digital inclusion.
• Natasha de Terán, Financial Services Consumer Panel, who discussed the inclusion possibilities and challe

 

John’s well-informed and measured perspective on the trends and likely “curves” around cash usage were as interesting and illuminating as you would expect.

The discussion also touched on what I cannot help but frame as “the Swedish problem” of allowing cashlessness to happen naturally and then dealing with the consequence rather than planning the transition to a cashless society. By cashless, of course, I do not mean a literally cashless society in which notes and coins cease to exist but cashless in the sense of William Gibson’s “Count Zero”, in which the author observes a near-future where cash isn’t illegal, but you can’t find anything legal to do with it.

It was also clear from the discussion that the future of cash is inextricably linked to the future of identity: we (as a country) have no real strategy for either digital money or digital identity and as time goes by this failure will be manifest in more than billions wasted on pandemic support measures.

Anyway, the reason that I mention this webinar is that it included a brief discussion on inclusion that set me thinking.

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Apple could see more value in being a partner to merchant acquirers and terminal makers than in trying to displace them, said Rick Oglesby, president of AZ Payments Group in Phoenix.

“Apple’s more likely to partner with, and tax, existing merchant service providers more than launch an aggressive strategy of displacing them,” Oglesby said.

From What Apple’s pact with Stripe means for the point of sale | PaymentsSource | American Banker.

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Prosecutors said on Tuesday the illegal proceeds were spent on a variety of things, from gold and non-fungible tokens to “absolutely mundane things such as purchasing a Walmart gift card for $500.”

From U.S. arrests couple for allegedly laundering $4.5 bln in crypto tied to Bitfinex hack | Reuters.

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