A library of snippets
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The Shanghai Data Exchange opened for business on Thursday, marking China’s latest attempt to build a vast market for data – dubbed the new oil of the digital economy – which can be sorted, priced and traded like regular commodities.
The new exchange, which started trading on Thursday, initially offered 20 data products, including flight information from China Eastern Airlines, and various data from telecommunications network operators China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom.
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Businesses may wish to note Nuapay’s recent research, which found that more than 54% of UK consumers, and 64% of mobile banking users, would be willing to pay via open banking today if given the opportunity. Interestingly, around three in ten consumers said that a trusted brand would encourage them to use open banking as an alternative to cards. In contrast, more than one in six said a retailer could incentivise them to use open banking through loyalty schemes.
Looking at where consumers would be willing to use open banking payments provides interesting insights. Consumers are more inclined to use Open Banking payments for everyday retail, such as groceries, (42%), than big-ticket travel items like flights and package holidays (39%). Financial services (45%), charities (45%) and government (44%) are also all likely to see high adoption rates.
From Open Banking is transforming retail – Open Banking Excellence.
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Pay by Bank uses Open Banking to transfer money directly to a merchant from a bank account, cutting out the need for a card. It is already offered by the major banks. Considering Amazon’s tendency for early adoption, it’s more surprising it has not already introduced this payment method. Expect to see it implemented soon, perhaps into Amazon Pay itself. Doing so would allow Amazon to cut out the middleman of payment cards altogether; a far greater challenge to Visa than the proposed credit card ban.
From In a world of open banking, Amazon holds all the cards in the face off with Visa.
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In 2018, Jieun Shin of the University of Florida also found that false rumours tend to “mutate” and resurge in zombie‑like forms, just like a virus. Studying 13 months during the 2012 US presidential election, she traced the lifecycle of 17 popular political rumours that had circulated on Twitter.
From Ways to make social media less ‘viral’ | Financial Times.
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That reshaping involves two parallel trends: an evolution of the front- and back-end parts of the payment system (instant payments; bill payments and request to pay; and plastic cards and digital wallets); and a revolution involving huge structural changes to the payment mix and ecosystem (emergence of so-called “buy now, pay later” offerings; cryptocurrencies; and work underway on central bank digital currencies).
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A consortium of 74 Japanese firms – including the country’s biggest banks – have set out plans to start testing a private sector digital yen in the coming months.
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Mizuho Financial Group and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group are among the firms from a range of industries backing the tentatively named Digital Currency JPY (DCJPY) project, which has been in the works since last year.
The consortium has now released a progress report and a white paper.
The digital currency will be backed by bank deposits and use a shared platform to accelerate fund transfers and settlement between companies. While there will be a shared platform, a separate “business process area” will mean that the currency can be programmed to meet different business needs of the participants.
Within the consortium, different group are looking at a host of use cases such as the purchase of clean energy, retail payments, industrial settlements and NFTS, with proof-of-concept work set to begin soon ahead of a full launch in the near future.
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It is sad that the name of William Samuel Henson is largely unknown today. A man of great vision, he petitioned Parliament for permission to set up an airline — with a business model largely based on post — flying to Egypt, India and China. Parliament turned his proposal down on the grounds that it was 1843 and no-one had invented airplanes yet. Henson knew this, obviously, but could see which way technology was evolving and correctly reasoned that just because he didn’t know how to get an airplane off the ground (he had been involved in numerous experiments around powered flight), that didn’t mean that no-one else would. And when they did, there would be a new business to build on aviation technology. So he started thinking about the businesses that would make sense and, since the post had just been invented in the UK, he looked at how that might work in the future.
As it happens, he was right. When the first commercial aviation contract was signed in 1911, it was for the US mail.
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Building living, interactive blueprints that replicate the physical world might, in time, come to shape it.
From Companies want to build a virtual realm to copy the real world | The Economist:
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This, of course, reminds us what Marshall McLuhan said a couple of generations ago: “we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us”.
Programmable payments are a great idea and there are surely some amazing new businesses that will be built of top of such functionality. There are not, however, as the President of Deutsche Bundesbank recently said “necessarily” a case for a retail CBDC. As he points out, an alternative solution might be for the private sector to tokenise commercial bank money and the EU’s “MiCa” regulations include a suitable framework for doing this, which is the industrial money solution favoured by the German banks. This is quite different from wholesale CBDC issued by the ECB itself. Such a commercial CBDC could “complement” innovative ways of exchanging and settling financial assets and, given that the tokenisation of assets is becoming increasingly prominent in the world of finance, deliver important benefits.
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Customer data can help to improve the services of platforms or to better target advertising. But they are also a treasure trove that can help platform providers to eke out a competitive edge in other markets. Moreover, by creating entire ecosystems, bigtech firms could enhance network effects and customer experience, thereby stimulating user activities, which generate yet more data.
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