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US custodian bank State Street, which provides custody services to institutional investors, launched a digital finance division to expand into areas including crypto, central bank digital currencies, blockchain and tokenisation. Heading up the new division is Nadine Chakar, the bank’s head of global markets.

“We will help clients optimise the performance of their investments by looking to develop digital trading opportunities, a natural expansion of our platforms in foreign exchange trading, by adding new cryptocurrency pairs to our services. We can also leverage our expertise in securities finance and lending to explore how investors can borrow and lend cryptoassets,” said Ms Chakar, speaking at IBM’s Reinventing Financial Services virtual event on June 8. While digitisation will start with over-the-counter instruments to drive efficiencies, she believes that all financial instruments could become digitalised in future.

State Street is following in the footsteps of rival, BNY Mellon, which launched an enterprise digital assets unit in February, with the aim of building a multi-asset digital custody and administration platform for traditional and digital assets. Citi, BNP Paribas Securities Services and HSBC Securities Services are among other large custodians that have indicated their interest in entering this space.

From Custodians on the cusp of crypto acceptance – Editor’s Blog –:

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But she is not concerned that custodians like State Street will be disintermediated. “The digital asset industry will require reliable and potentially regulated providers of that post-trade data to power automated workflows in the form of smart contracts. Without this, automation opportunities presented by smart contracts simply will not work,” she says. “Regulated banks can offer these services and act as so-called ‘data oracles’. And importantly, this will create new business models and new business opportunities.”

From Custodians on the cusp of crypto acceptance – Editor’s Blog –:

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A female trader is reportedly the latest victim of robbers who stole her HKD 3.5 million ($451,000) worth in tether (USDT) tokens.

One of the Robbers Gained Female’s Trust by Performing Three Successful Transactions
According to the South China Morning Post, thieves lured the female crypto trader to an office for arranging the deal. The incident took place at the Ricky Centre on Chong Yip Street in Kwun Tong, said the authorities.

Initially, the robber allegedly gained the female trader’s trust by successfully performing three transactions before the incident. The amount of money traded was in the range between HKD 600,000 ($77,400) to HKD 700,000 ($90,300).

At the time of the robbery, the woman agreed to deal with the same man. One police source told South China Morning Post:

Investigations showed she was paid HKD 3.5 million in cash after using her iPhone to complete an online transaction and sell him USDT tokens.

But right after the trade took place, three men carrying knives and rods jumped out from another room and took the money and the woman’s phone. Robbers didn’t flee from the scene without first locking the female crypto trader inside the office.

From Robbers Take $450K From a Tether Trader During an In-Person Transaction in Hong Kong — Second Incident in 2021 – News Bitcoin News.

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A student had £6,000 of cryptocurrency stolen at knifepoint after telling a housemate about his online investments, his mother said.

The victim, who was in his first year at Canterbury Christ Church University, was forced to move back home after a gang of eight men entered his student accommodation and demanded the passwords to his financial apps.

From Gang mugged Canterbury Christ Church University student for bitcoin password | News | The Times.

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Police in the Netherlands are investigating the brutal torture of a bitcoin trader, whose home was raided by criminals looking for cryptocurrency.

From Bitcoin trader brutally tortured with drill in cryptocurrency robbery | The Independent | The Independent.

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Commonwealth Bank of Australia is implementing artificial intelligence technology and machine learning techniques to detect serial abusive behaviour in transaction descriptions within the CommBank App and Netbank.

The Australian bank last year acted to ban customers that used transaction description fields to send abusive messages, including threates to domestic abuse victims.

A study by the bank, prompted by disturbing messages in the account of a customer experiencing domestic and family violence, found that more than 8000 customers had received multiple low-value deposits, often of less than $1, with potentially abusive messages.

From CommBank implements AI tool to root out abusive messages in transaction fields:

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The coins would have belonged to a wealthy person who probably buried them for safekeeping at some point after the Norman Invasion of 1066 and probably before 1072.

From A ‘Mind-Blowing’ $6 Million Coin Hoard Discovered by Treasure Hunters Will Be Unveiled at the British Museum | Artnet News:

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Fireblocks has built APIs to allow institutions to hold, manage and transfer Cryptoassets. As institutions become more interested in DeFi, Fireblocks has partnered with major DeFi protocol AAVE to offer a “whitelist only” version of the AAVE protocol. This allows financial institutions who are required to “Know their Customer” to only transact with other KYC’d entities on the DeFi protocol.
🤔 You can have DeFi and KYC.

From Fintech 🧠 Food – Oct 10, 2021 – Google kills Plex, Fireblocks makes KYC and DeFi compatible & Why Facebook shows the dangers of becoming Incumbent – by Simon Taylor – Fintech Brain Food 🧠:

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World’s Most Unbanked Countries 2021 (Source: Global Finance).

Country	Unbanked %
Morocco	71
Vietnam	69
Egypt	67
Philippines	66
Mexico	63
Nigeria	60
Peru	57
Colombia	54
Indonesia	51
Argentina	51

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US-based remittance firm Ria Money Transfer partnered with India’s Paytm to expand cross-border payment connections.

The partnership will let Ria customers send transfers to Paytm’s 333 million users that will be settled in real time, per Yahoo Finance. Transfers can be made through Ria’s app, website, or brick-and-mortar locations.

From New remittance tie-ups tap reinvigorated cross-border payments – Insider Intelligence Trends, Forecasts & Statistics:

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Economists have developed a toolbox of analytical approaches to produce estimates of what is happening in the economy now and in the recent past (as well as forming a view of where it is going in the near future). This is typically referred to as ‘nowcasting’ – a contraction of ‘now’ and ‘forecasting’, building on a long history of economic forecasting.

From How can we measure what is happening in the economy now? – Economics Observatory:

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This kind of a system will also create a database of vulnerable women – together with their personal details, their phone numbers, their home addresses, the routes they take to get home – including when they use them – and that they feel vulnerable coming home. This will be a honeypot of data for any potential stalker – and again, we must not forget that Wayne Couzens was a serving police officer, and that he planned the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard carefully. Systems like this would be a perfect tool for another would-be Wayne Couzens – and also to ‘smaller scale’ creeps and misogynists.

From BT’s ‘Walk me home’: tech solutionism at its worst – Paul Bernal’s Blog:

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The head of the European Banking Federation (EBF), Ana Botín, has called for a more “dynamic” set of banking regulations in the bloc so that the sector can compete with US peers.

 

From EBF head calls for EU banking regulation reform to compete with US – FinTech Futures:

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