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Banking-as-a-service (BaaS) is hardly a new endeavour for Starling, Raisin DS became its first commercial client all the way back in 2018, and the bank even won a UK government contract to provide payment services for the Department for Work and Pensions.

Starling now counts 30 clients of its BaaS offering, up from 25 in September, including SumUp, CurrencyCloud, Moneybox and, most recently, Standard Chartered.

Indeed this November, Standard Chartered announced Shoal, a new ‘flanker’ brand launching in 2022 for consumers to invest in green and sustainable projects, and with accounts powered by Starling Bank.

From Exclusive: Starling Bank plans to take its banking-as-a-service offering global – AltFi.

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Our audit exercise focused on three relatively uncontroversial tenets of consumer protection: customers should have access to pricing information, pricing information should be correct, and prices should comply with government regulations. We found opportunities for improvement in each of these areas.

From How Can We Deepen Transparency in Nigeria’s Digital Financial Services? | Innovations for Poverty Action:

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Benoît Cœuré, chief of the Bank for International Settlements’ innovation hub

“You need central bank money as a safe asset that can be used as a settlement asset to make the new system stable . . . It’s not about CBDC being the sovereign alternative to private money, it’s more about CBDC being the glue that will hold the system together.”

From Benoît Cœuré says regulators likely to agree crypto framework in 2022 | Financial Times.

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Benoît Cœuré, chief of the Bank for International Settlements’ innovation hub

Cœuré said the Financial Stability Board, a global grouping of finance ministries and regulators hosted by BIS, would be the most natural forum to agree a consistent framework and that it was possible for them to do it in 2022,

From Benoît Cœuré says regulators likely to agree crypto framework in 2022 | Financial Times.

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Blockchain technology is central to the development of the metaverse and Web 3, Goldman Sachs said in a research report.

It is the only technology that can “uniquely identify any virtual object independent of a central authority,” and this ability to identify and track ownership will be crucial to the functioning of the metaverse, analysts led by Rod Hall wrote in a note published on Dec. 14.

From Goldman Sachs Says Blockchain Is Key to Metaverse and Web 3 Development.

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The answers are taking the form of services and apps that are the first outlines of what their creators hope will someday eat the internet completely: a distributed, democratically ruled “Web 3.0” or “Web3” that will rise like a phoenix of 1990s-era Web 1.0-idealism from out of the ashes of the corporation-controlled Web 2.0 that all of us currently inhabit.

From Jack Dorsey and the Unlikely Revolutionaries Who Want to Reboot the Internet – WSJ.

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These technologies represent an evolution of cryptocurrency beyond bitcoin—which some in crypto communities now deride as mere “digital gold.” In addition to monetary value, the “tokens” that make up these systems are each also encoded with information that has some other use, whether it’s membership in a club, the right to vote on how a company conducts itself, or even just data.

 

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If money can become code, then money can be way more than a means of exchange; it can also do anything that other software can do.

This core insight, a sort of E = mc² equivalence between money and software, is why true believers in Web3 think it could have such a huge impact.

From Jack Dorsey and the Unlikely Revolutionaries Who Want to Reboot the Internet – WSJ.

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But there’s also an entirely new type of commerce that we’re likely to see in the Metaverse, including buying clothes or items for our digital avatars. We’ve already seen this happen with games, like Fortnite, where users can buy outfits for their digital characters. That phenomenon is likely to expand as people begin to create a digital identity that travels with them across different experiences, and it’s very likely that Facebook could be the place users create and maintain that virtual identity.

From Facebook’s Metaverse Ambitions Could Boost Its Shopping Business – Bloomberg:

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WeChat and Alipay were mobile wallets before becoming superapps. Their success is largely due to the underlying payments foundation that glues together the multitude of services available on each platform and makes it easier for users to try new ones.

From The key to superapp success is a super wallet:

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On Dec. 2, a month after Ms. Baumann first appealed to Instagram to restore her account, The New York Times contacted Meta to ask why it had been shut down… Two days later, the account was back online.

From Her Instagram Handle Was ‘Metaverse.’ Last Month, It Vanished. – The New York Times:

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In 2012, she had started an Instagram account with the handle @metaverse, a name she used in her creative work. On the account, she documented her life in Brisbane, where she studied fine art, and her travels to Shanghai, where she built an augmented reality company called Metaverse Makeovers.

She had fewer than 1,000 followers when Facebook, the parent company of Instagram, announced on Oct. 28 that it was changing its name. Henceforth, Facebook would be known as Meta, a reflection of its focus on the metaverse, a virtual world it sees as the future of the internet.

In the days before, as word leaked out, Ms. Baumann began receiving messages from strangers offering to buy her Instagram handle. “You are now a millionaire,” one person wrote on her account. Another warned: “fb isn’t gonna buy it, they’re gonna take it.”
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On Nov. 2, exactly that happened.

Early that morning, when she tried to log in to Instagram, she found that the account had been disabled. A message on the screen read: “Your account has been blocked for pretending to be someone else.”

From Her Instagram Handle Was ‘Metaverse.’ Last Month, It Vanished. – The New York Times:

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