Snippings

Speaking at the Payment Leaders’ Summit in London in October 2021, Rupert Lee-Browne (CEO of Caxton) said that he saw three key challenges for the payments business when it comes to helping merchants to grow: the cost of payments, the friction associated with current payment mechanisms and the raised expectations of consumers.

When it comes to the cost, we all understand

 

The guy who fixed my car told me that some months the bill from his acquirer can be in the region of £500-£600, which is a good chunk of his overheads.

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The Global South encompasses dozens of countries across multiple continents, and so we can’t feasibly cover every unique stew of socioeconomic and cultural issues that resulted in each of them being chained to a handful of apps. But if you take a step back and squint hard enough, what becomes clear is that Facebook was never the villain here. (Or, at least, it’s not the villain you might think it is.) Phone companies are.

From Here’s Why WhatsApp Dominates The Global South:

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if we stay on a declining real interest rate trend, the future of central banking has to include negative real interest rate policy, which involves taxing and ultimately phasing out cash

From Some philosophical questions about the future of central banking – Central Banking:

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A week after the project launch, the anonymous developer known as Evil Ape who promised that game vanished along with the project’s official Twitter account and website. But they left traces behind on the blockchain that shows they siphoned 798 ether ($2.7 million) out of the project’s funds in multiple transfers.

From Investors Spent Millions on ‘Evolved Apes’ NFTs. Then They Got Scammed:

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About $90 million has mistakenly gone out to users of Compound, a popular decentralized-finance staking protocol, and the founder is begging users to voluntarily return the tokens.
“Keep 10% as a white-hat. Otherwise, it’s being reported as income to the IRS, and most of you are doxxed,” Robert Leshner, founder of Compound Labs, tweeted late Thursday.

From DeFi protocol Compound mistakenly gives away $90 million to users:

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Clearview has collected billions of photos from across websites that include Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and uses AI to identify a particular person in images.

From Clearview AI Has New Tools to Identify You in Photos | WIRED:

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Hackers stole cryptocurrencies from at least 6,000 customers of the Nasdaq-listed digital asset exchange Coinbase by exploiting a flaw in its two-factor authentication system.

From Hackers stole cryptocurrencies from at least 6,000 Coinbase customers | Financial Times:

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Bank of America’s online-banking platform went down for several hours Friday, leaving thousands of customers locked out of their accounts before service was restored.

From BofA outage shuts out thousands online, service now restored | American Banker:

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60% of people closed their accounts. But the ones that remained were 20x more valuable.

From Holvi plans credit card launch, fundraise and IPO after split with BBVA | Sifted.

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Holvi lost 60% of its customers and 50% of its staff after buying itself out from BBVA. But the SME banking startup is making more money.

From Holvi plans credit card launch, fundraise and IPO after split with BBVA | Sifted.

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