Snippings

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In much of Europe and East Asia you can go for weeks without touching paper money or coins. In 2013, a bank robber in Sweden was thwarted because the bank he targeted didn’t have any money to steal: The branch was a cashless location.

From Opinion | Cash Is Out. Crypto Is In. What’s Happening to Money? – The New York Times:

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In the late 1990s, parametric insurance emerged as an objective and data-driven approach to insurance claim payments. Under parametric insurance models, claim payments are based solely on the occurrence of a clearly defined event/objective measurable data-led criteria and provide an agreed payments or an amount calculated by reference to agreed formulae. For example, if an earthquake occurs within a set radius of a policyholder’s home (measured in kilometres), then the insurer automatically pays out the agreed amount corresponding to that event.

The parametric insurance model is attractive as it avoids subjective assessment of damages and loss. While the uptake of parametric insurance is increasing in first party loss classes (especially the agriculture and crop sectors), it has not progressed as rapidly as expected due to the historical lack of reliable infrastructure and available data for securely settling these forms of contracts.

From Blockchain Technology and the Future of the Global Insurance Industry : Clyde & Co.

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In particular, if it were possible for capital to be allocated effectively without the trust and authority of large centralized capital providers (“Wall Street” so to speak), that would be a foundational advance. In that regard, what I’d be looking for is evidence of capital allocation via cryptocurrencies toward productive investment in the operating economy rather than capital allocation toward imaginary assets.

From Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3 – O’Reilly.

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Unfortunately, time proved that the creators of [the web] were too idealistic, failing to take into account bad actors and, perhaps more importantly, failing to anticipate the enormous centralization of power that would be made possible by big data, even on top of a decentralized network.

From Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3 – O’Reilly.

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All eyes are now on how regulators and corporate treasurers respond to the idea of “programmable money”

From Bankers quietly mould crypto innovations for their own use | Financial Times.

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Gillian Tett, writing in the Financial Times, makes a similar point.

Take JPMorgan. This year, Umar Farooq, head of the bank’s Onyx project (which has created a JPMorgan crypto coin and ethereum-style blockchain platform), revealed that it is developing so-called “programmable money” for corporate clients. This aims to enable treasurers to cut deals with partners via a shared computing ledger, on autopilot, with an innovation known as “smart contracts”: instead of using crypto as a store of value (ie investment), the JPMorgan initiative uses it as a payment method to transfer values linked to other assets — including fuddy-duddy fiat currency.

However, this second usage of crypto will almost certainly end up being far more important than bitcoin for the business world, not least because it comes as other banks are racing to develop crypto-innovations, too.

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Minerva Intelligence’s “Sunday Briefing” (which I always, always read) touched on this in it’s 19th December 2021 issue, arguing that digital coins could replace the national money supply in developing countries with weak currencies and unreliable governments. Of the top twenty countries with the highest degree of crypto
adoption, 19 are emerging and frontier markets. Number one is Vietnam, followed by India, Pakistan, Ukraine and Kenya. There are more peer-to-peer cryptocurrency transactions in sub-Saharan Africa than in North America (the US is the only developed economy in the top twenty, at number eight).

In an astonishing incident earlier this month my friend the Dutch “trend watcher” Vincent Everts was subject to a terrifying armed robbery in his own home during a live-streamed discussion about the corona crisis with Maurice de Hond. Around 2,000 people were watching when three men burst in, threatened his family and held a gun to his head demanding Bitcoin, at which point Maurice said ‘Shall I call the police’ and continued the broadcast. Vincent told the criminals that he had no bitcoins and they ran away.

Now, shocking as this is, I am genuinely surprised that it doesn’t happen more often.

Stuart Young, chair of the digital identity group, said that in a use case with insurance brokers, conveyancers who adopt the digital identity trust scheme standards could see PII cover reduce by 40 to 60 per cent.

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The digital identity trust scheme will allow consumers to use one digital identity when buying or selling a home that is then shared by the consumer with connected parties such as estate agents, conveyancers, mortgage intermediaries and mortgage lenders.

He said that in Norway, which adopted a one identity standard, the technology had lowered mortgage fraud from one per cent of transactions to 0.00042 per cent. He also said that processing times in certain Scandinavian countries had been reduced from 16 days to one day.

From Digital identity roll out could save advisers up to 60 per cent on PII cover – Mortgage Solutions:

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Young said: “Today, identity providers don’t carry any liability because the process is: I provide you with the information and it’s entirely up to your own risk assessment to make a decision based on the information that I’ve given to you, but if you look through the scheme, the liabilities are now pushed back on to the identity providers.

“In the end if they don’t do what they’re contractually meant to do or make a slip up in what they’re doing. that gives you recourse so they are actually having to carry liability now and that is written into the contracts of the scheme.”

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PDS2’s political objective is to nurture companies that bring competition to the market, promote innovation, and improve security. None of this is happening because of how SCA and 90 Day Reauth have been designed and implemented.

From The detrimental impact of SCA and 90-day reauthentication on the Open Banking market – ThePaypers:

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Now there will be no need for customers to jump through the credential sharing hoops with each of their connected banks every 90-days. Instead, it will be for the AISP, such as TrueLayer, to manage the customer’s data sharing, by asking the customer at 90-day intervals whether they wish for data sharing to continue.

From FCA boosts Open Banking by removing 3-month re-authentication requirement:

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