Snippings

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One of the perks of going digital with something like a license is that you don’t need to share all your info with every establishment. The club bouncer, for instance, no longer needs to know your address—just your name and date of birth.

From Wallets Are Over. Your Phone Is Your Everything Now. – WSJ.

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While a healthy share of American adults believe the financial services industry is due for an update — 2 in 5 adults agree there is a lack of innovation in the industry — the U.S. remains one of the least enthused markets for open banking.

From The Future of Open Banking is Blurry for U.S. Consumers – Morning Consult.

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Seven years post-launch, new PYMNTS data shows that 93.9% of consumers with Apple Pay activated on their iPhones do not use it in-store to pay for purchases.

That means only 6.1% do.

From 6% of People With iPhones Use Apple Pay In-Store | PYMNTS.com.

My wife exemplifies this dynamic. She is an intelligent person and in most respects representative of the general public, in that she doesn’t really care about payments. She has Apple Pay on her iPhone, but can’t be bothered to use in it shops. She has a contactless payment key ring (from Tovi Sorga) that she uses all the time for regular shopping and a John Lewis cashback Mastercard for larger purchases. I use Apple Pay all the time, she never uses it. Now it look as if the survey results confirm that she is a normal person, I am not.

The post-pandemic landscape

We asked people what payment methods they used to pay in the last 24 hours when shopping in a store and compared it to the same data captured in prior studies. We observe that between 2019 and 2021 cash use declined 20.1%; credit card use increased by 33.8%; and debit card use declined slightly by 7.2%.

Mobile wallet use in-store declined 26.2%.

From 6% of People With iPhones Use Apple Pay In-Store | PYMNTS.com.

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Open banking is quickly becoming a “when,” not an “if,” for U.S. banks, as the Biden administration calls for improved consumer controls of personal financial data and banks accelerate their efforts to incorporate application program interfaces (APIs) into their services. But Americans’ lack of awareness of the concept, per recent Morning Consult international polling, paired with consumer fears over data privacy, could hinder open banking’s success stateside.

From The Future of Open Banking is Blurry for U.S. Consumers – Morning Consult.

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Merchants have two things in common: 1) They’ll do anything to make a sale, and 2) They hate (with a passion) interchange.

If merchants can reduce interchange fees by driving purchases from debit and credit cards to other forms of payments, they’ll do what they can to make that happen.

As Buy Now, Pay Later providers collect more data about consumers’ shopping and buying behaviors, they will become better partners to merchants than the banks and payment networks are.

From Buy Now, Pay Later: The “New” Payments Trend Generating $100 Billion In Sales:

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Sometimes major shifts happen virtually unnoticed. On May 5, IBM announced Project CodeNet to very little media or academic attention.

CodeNet is a follow-up to ImageNet, a large-scale dataset of images and their descriptions; the images are free for non-commercial uses. ImageNet is now central to the progress of deep learning computer vision.

CodeNet is an attempt to do for Artifical Intelligence (AI) coding what ImageNet did for computer vision: it is a dataset of over 14 million code samples, covering 50 programming languages, intended to solve 4,000 coding problems. The dataset also contains numerous additional data, such as the amount of memory required for software to run and log outputs of running code.

GPT-3, OpenAI’s industry-leading NLP model, has been used to allow coding a website or app by writing a description of what you want. Soon after IBM’s news, Microsoft announced it had secured exclusive rights to GPT-3.

Microsoft also owns GitHub, — the largest collection of open source code on the internet — acquired in 2018. The company has added to GitHub’s potential with GitHub Copilot, an AI assistant. When the programmer inputs the action they want to code, Copilot generates a coding sample that could achieve what they specified. The programmer can then accept the AI-generated sample, edit it or reject it, drastically simplifying the coding process. Copilot is a huge step towards NLC, but it is not there yet.

From Google and Microsoft are creating a monopoly on coding in plain language:

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There is also reason to believe that such technologies will be dominated by platform corporations due to the way machine learning works. Theoretically, programs such as Copilot improve when introduced to new data: the more they are used, the better they become. This makes it harder for new competitors, even if they have a stronger or more ethical product.

Unless there is a serious counter effort, it seems likely that large capitalist conglomerates will be the gatekeepers of the next coding revolution.

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Xi’s data vision has always stressed control. In 2013, he said that “whoever controls data has the upper hand”. A year later he said that control of information has become an important aspect of a country’s “soft power and competitiveness”. The official classification of data in 2020 as a “fifth factor of production”, alongside labour, land, capital and technology, further revealed its importance to Beijing.

From China and Big Tech: Xi’s blueprint for a digital dictatorship | Financial Times.

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“The embrace of digital sovereignty plays a key role in protecting our national interest against enemy forces at home and abroad.”

From China and Big Tech: Xi’s blueprint for a digital dictatorship | Financial Times.

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Gensler said he had been focusing on cryptocurrency trading platforms because 95 per cent or more of the activity in this “highly speculative asset” takes place in such venues — with investor protections he described as “really sparse”.

He said cryptocurrencies and decentralised finance (DeFi) platforms pose a challenge for regulators because they exist without traditional brokers, to whom laws can be easily applied. Instead, they offer opportunities for investors to deal more directly with each other.

But he said regulators would be able to exercise authority over even supposedly decentralised platforms.

From Crypto platforms need regulation to survive, says SEC boss | Financial Times.

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