A library of snippets
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the aim for Mohanty is that cutting out corresponding banks while reducing costs to comply with anti-money laundering and know-your-customer regulations will bring down fees
From Singapore’s Central Bank Is Building A Bitcoin Inspired Currency Using JP Morgan Technology.
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PayNearMe, the modern and reliable payments platform known for making payments easy for both businesses and customers, announced that effective August 2021 PayNearMe customers will be able to complete bill payment transactions at participating Walmart locations. By expanding its partnership with Green Dot (NYSE: GDOT), a financial technology company committed to seamlessly connecting people to their money, PayNearMe can enable consumers to access Green Dot’s more than 90,000 retail locations nationwide.
To pay bills at participating Walmart stores, customers simply show an associate at the Money Services desk or Customer Service desk the scannable code on their smartphone, pay with cash and collect a receipt that confirms the payment is completed. Funds are then transferred to the biller electronically through a single consolidated settlement.
Michael Kaplan, Chief Revenue Officer and General Manager, PayNearMe, said “Nearly a quarter of the U.S. population prefers – or needs – to pay their bills in cash, and when these individuals can pay their rent, car payments and utility bills in the same location where they shop, paying bills on time becomes easier and more convenient. We’re excited to offer more PayNearMe locations for consumers to make cash payments.”
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For the first decade or so, it was far from clear whether the credit card was continue to exist as a product at all, and as late as 1970 there were people predicting that banks would abandon the concept completely. What changed everything was technology: the introduction of the magnetic stripe and Visa’s BASE I online authorisation system. This changed the customer experience, transformed the risk management and cut costs dramatically. Everything changed with automated authorisation.
I can’t resist pointing out that it was the London transit system that pioneered the use of magnetic stripes on the back of cardboard cards in a mass market product (seven years earlier, in 1964). The first transaction was at Stamford Brook station on 5th January 1964, well before BankAmericard (the precursor to Visa) introduced their first bank-issued magnetic stripe card in 1972 in conjunction with the deployment of the BASE I electronic authorisation system in 1973.
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The magnetic stripe will start to disappear in 2024 from Mastercard payment cards in regions, such as Europe, where chip cards are already widely used. Banks in the U.S. will no longer be required to issue chip cards with a magnetic stripe, starting in 2027.
“It’s time to fully embrace these best-in-class capabilities, which ensure consumers can pay simply, swiftly and with peace of mind,” says Ajay Bhalla, president of Mastercard’s Cyber & Intelligence business. “What’s best for consumers is what’s best for everyone in the ecosystem.”
By 2029, no new Mastercard credit or debit cards will be issued with a magnetic stripe. Prepaid cards in the U.S. and Canada are currently exempt from this change.
From Goodbye magnetic stripe.
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To that end, the banking giant’s newly announced service has launched in pilot — enabling corporates to send requests for payment to the bank’s 57 million retail customers who, in turn, can pay those invoices immediately — represents a milestone on the road to real time.
Read more: JPMorgan Piloting Real-Time Payment Service
The Corporate Version Of A Zelle Payment Request
The natural progression, according to Bhathawalla, will be to move from its current pilot phase to full scale launch with other The Clearing House (TCH) Real-Time Payments (RTP) participant banks, and eventually move from B2C to B2B use cases, leveraging connectivity that’s already in place with real-time rails.
From JPMC’s RfP Pilot Sets Stage For Faster Payments | PYMNTS.com:
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Now Novi, Facebook’s crypto wallet subsidiary, is looking for a different stablecoin.
From Future of Diem hangs in the balance as Novi looks for an alternative:
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A second approach is to use forms of governance that are not coin-voting-driven. But if coins do not determine what weight an account has in governance, what does? There are two natural alternatives:
Proof of personhood systems: systems that verify that accounts correspond to unique individual humans, so that governance can assign one vote per human. See here for a review of some techniques being developed, and ProofOfHumanity and BrightID for two attempts to implement this.
Proof of participation: systems that attest to the fact that some account corresponds to a person that has participated in some event, passed some educational training, or performed some useful work in the ecosystem. See POAP for one attempt to implement thus.
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Small groups of wealthy participants (“whales”) are better at successfully executing decisions than large groups of small-holders. This is because of the tragedy of the commons among small-holders: each small-holder has only an insignificant influence on the outcome, and so they have little incentive to not be lazy and actually vote. Even if there are rewards for voting, there is little incentive to research and think carefully about what they are voting for.
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DeGov is dangerous
However, all current instantiations of decentralized governance come with great risks. To followers of my writing, this discussion will not be new; the risks are much the same as those that I talked about here, here and here. There are two primary types of issues with coin voting that I worry about: (i) inequalities and incentive misalignments even in the absence of attackers, and (ii) outright attacks through various forms of (often obfuscated) vote buying.
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Companies originating loans had a greater economic incentive to screen for these warning signs and act on them — say, by requesting a user pass knowledge-based authentication or upload an identity document. The loan attempts at SpeedyCash, NetCredit, and Best Egg were all successfully blocked — the damage was limited to the hard inquiries they left behind, which can be removed.
On the transactional/bank account side, companies have much less incentive to monitor and act on attributes that can indicate fraud. Additional screening costs money and introduces “friction,” which may reduce the conversion rate of legitimate customers, raising the cost of customer acquisition.
In the case of fraudulently opened bank accounts, there’s often little cost to the FIs — the burden of detecting and fixing the fall out lands mostly on consumers.
From My Identity Was Stolen: How Banks vs Fintechs Responded – by Jason Mikula – Fintech Business Weekly:
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According to the Aite Group, 47 percent of Americans experienced financial identity theft in 2020. The group’s report, U.S. Identity Theft: The Stark Reality, found that losses from identity theft cases cost $502.5 billion in 2019 and increased 42 percent to $712.4 billion in 2020. The group explains that the huge increase was fueled by the high rate of unemployment identity theft during the pandemic, as increased and extended unemployment benefits made the sector an attractive target for fraudsters.
Losses are forecast to increase again in 2021 to $721.3 billion. The study narrowed the identity theft definition to include only application fraud, where criminals used a victim’s identity to open a new account of some type, and account takeover, where an account is taken so criminals can steal money or access rewards.From Facts + Statistics: Identity theft and cybercrime | III:
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