A library of snippets
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China’s central bank has called for wider acceptance of cash in economic activities and vowed to punish those who refuse to accept cash payments in the wake of a widening gap in access to digital services.
From China central bank urges wider acceptance of cash as payments go digital | Reuters:
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In the case of financial institutions, whose enhanced identity verification instruments are among the most trustworthy and robust on the market, the new wallet opens up a world of possibilities to participate in the new ecosystem, both as identity authentication service providers and, ultimately, as the suppliers of the wallet itself
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Japanese telco NTT Docomo has teamed up with Sony and NXP Semiconductors to trial technology that lets shoppers make NFC payments without having to take their phones out of their pockets.
The system taps NXP’s Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technology which can track user movement and 360 degree positioning with location accuracy of a few centimetres
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Amazon may be looking to bring the cashierless tech found at its Go convenience stores to Whole Foods supermarkets as early as next year
From Amazon Go’s cashierless tech may come to Whole Foods as soon as next year – The Verge:
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We tried to pay $1 in cash for a soda at Amazon’s cashier-less convenience store of the future, and it took way longer than expected
From What it’s like to pay cash at a cashless Amazon Go store – Business Insider:
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ACLU
Participation in a cashless society presumes a level of financial stability and enmeshment in bureaucratic financial systems that many people simply do not possess. Opening a bank account requires an ID, which many poor and elderly people lack, as well as other documents such as a utility bill or other proof of address, which the homeless lack, and which generally create bureaucratic barriers to participating in electronic payment networks. Banks also charge fees that can be significant for people living on the economic margins.
From Say No to the “Cashless Future” — and to Cashless Stores | American Civil Liberties Union:
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Nearly half of millennial online traders have more trust in cryptocurrency exchanges than the U.S. stock market, a new survey from investment platform eToro has revealed.
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The big change in financial services will come when customers use AI to assess offers from financial institutions. They will have access to AI as powerful as the banks have – because Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon (and companies like them) will be giving it to them. And this will mean individuals won’t be the customers: their bots will be.
People will want – and develop – their own bots to take care of things. Financial services will no longer be about 300-year-old brands, which a bot isn’t necessarily aware of, or sponsoring sporting events, which a bot doesn’t care about. Bots will be able to negotiate with their counterparts – bots at regulated financial institutions – to obtain the best possible product for their owners.
There are still some details to be worked out. If customers aren’t sure that they want to be in the loop when the details of a pension plan are being explained, they will still want some sort of assurance that there’s a regulator involved.
But if a regulatory framework evolves, then the key question for consumers will become a question of which bot, not which bank. Consumers will choose bots whose moral and ethical frameworks are congruent with theirs. If customers can find such a bot, then why would they risk making suboptimal choices around their financial health by interfering in their decisions?
From The future of banking is basically robots running everything | WIRED UK:
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In the last few weeks, payment companies have suffered frequent “downtimes” or “outages” on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform leading to many unprocessed customer and merchant transactions, four payments industry executives, who operate UPI-based apps and platforms, told MediaNama.
While the adoption of UPI has grown significantly since April, there has been a corresponding rise in transaction failures on account of the high volumes of transactions flowing through the banking system. UPI, which is operated by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), is the fastest growing retail payments platform in the country. In November this year, the platform clocked over 220 crore transactions worth ₹3.9 lakh crore in November this year, up by 90% from March. Between April and November this year, over ₹23 lakh crore worth of transactions flowed through the UPI system, according to NPCI data.
Several frequent outages
A senior payments executive told MediaNama that the current UPI system is “completely broken and it is not just outages that are the problem but there is no transparency on what is happening.” Since then implementation of UPI was left to the banks, with a zero merchant-discount-rate most of the banks are not upgrading their system while transactions keep scaling, this person said on the condition of anonymity.
“There is no economic model in UPI payments, banks are not investing and some of them have said they are not interested in even maintaining the required infrastructure. So the whole UPI system was set up in haste and was scaled in haste, that people are now losing confidence. People now are saying it’s better to use a wallet because there are no multiple parties in the chain, compared to 4 parties in the UPI system,” the payments executive quoted above said.
A second payments executives said that the number of issues on the system have been rising for some time, but the frequency of outages have increased significantly in the last few weeks. “It is not a network issue, because that can be easily resolved by the customer re-initiating the transaction. It certainly seems like a capacity issue with the banks, perhaps they are short-staffed or the quantum of transactions is too high to handle and therefore is a memory problem at the server level,” this person said on the condition of anonymity.
A standard UPI transaction, whether through a QR-code scan or UPI ID, begins with a debit from the remmiter’s account, which is then passed to the NPCI’s UPI Switch, and then the funds are credited to the beneficiaries’ bank account, within a matter of seconds.
A third payments executive said that for many customers the failure is happening at the debit level itself and if the transaction fails after multiple attempts, it means that the downtime is lasting for a long time. “We are practically seeing one issue or the other every day, and it is affecting all banks whether they are the remmitter or beneficiary. Some of the smaller private and public banks are not focusing on UPI since there is no money to be made, and its just a load on their infrastructure,” this person said on the condition of anonymity.
From Payment companies suffer frequent UPI system outages | MediaNama:
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China’s central bank has stepped up action against merchants refusing to accept cash payments, on concerns over financial stability amid a surge in the use of mobile payment systems across the country.
In the latest move, the People’s Bank of China’s branch in Hefei, capital of Anhui province, announced in a statement that any vendor found to have rejected cash would be punished,From China’s central bank cracks down on merchants who refuse to take cash | South China Morning Post:
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Aware of this problem, the European Commission is proposing to amend the eIDAS Regulation (on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions), approved in 2016, to oblige Member States to issue digital identity wallets, defined as a service that will allow users to store data, credentials and attributes linked to their identity and either share them with third parties who request them, or use them to identify themselves online or offline, all at European level.
The wallets will be voluntary for citizens, but both the States and private companies, particularly those which use enhanced identification systems (such as the financial sector) will be obliged to accept them as valid. The bigtechs will also have to use them if requested by users.
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All eligible handbags bought and sold in the U.S. will be vetted and verified by eBay’s team of professionally trained authenticators, using detailed physical inspection and advanced technical equipment in a state-of-the-art facility.
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