Snippings

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In the Request to Pay alternative as the payer is retrieving all their payment requests into their chosen app they have full control over how they want to pay.  If they aren’t happy with the options in their current app they can simply move apps and retrieve the messages into their new app.  This means the scope of payment options could be huge, I could very easily see for example cash based payment from the likes of Paypoint or Paysafe Cash being an option as well as cards and the killer Open Banking use case.  Either way the customer is in full control whilst the biller gets a digital payment acknowledgement to facilitate their reconciliation process.

From Why bill payment is no longer somewhere you go, but something you do – Northey Point Limited:

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Another area of the Kaspersky study looks at how many users in a region have attempted to open phishing links in 2020. Brazil had the worst figures in this regard, with 19.94 percent of users trying to open phishing links. The UK saw roughly half this figure at 9.75 percent. Other regions with higher figures included Cameroon (17.32 percent), France (17.9 percent), and Australia (16.59 percent).

From UK Cyber Security and Cyber Crime Statistics in 2021:

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While only a small portion of companies paid the ransom, these types of attacks can still be very expensive to fix. Indeed, Sophos found that the average cost for UK organizations was $839,796.42. This put the UK in the top eight countries for ransomware remediation costs. Sweden and Japan headed the list with average costs of $2.75 million and $2.19 million respectively.

From UK Cyber Security and Cyber Crime Statistics in 2021:

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For attacks that were successful, around 13 percent of UK companies went ahead and paid the ransom demanded by cyber criminals. This was well below the global average of 26 percent and far lower than the top payers. In India, 66 percent of organizations paid while in Sweden, the figure was 50 percent, and in the Philippines, 32 percent.

From UK Cyber Security and Cyber Crime Statistics in 2021:

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hat early embrace has dovetailed with the bitcoin position of Dorsey, its co-founder and CEO. Dorsey has said that the cryptocurrency will eventually unite the world. With a decentralized exchange, Square could offer greater access to bitcoin.

Other Square executives have hinted at details of its structure. While it’s unclear what blockchain network the DEX will be built on, the Bitcoin blockchain could be a contender. The division’s lead, Mike Brock, tweeted Friday that “We’d love for this to be Bitcoin-native, top to bottom.”

From Jack Dorsey’s Square Moves Closer to a Bitcoin Exchange — The Information:

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Well, here we are again. It’s 16th September and International Identity Day (IID) once more*, so I’m here to rejoice with you all. To celebrate this auspicious date, * In case you are wondering why IID is 16th September, the choice of the date is in recognition of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16.9 which calls for legal identity for all including birth registration by 2030.

 

For a variety of reasons, I hope that the big banks are able to come together to respond to the comments of my favourite Canadian Mark Carney, who when Governor of the Bank of England spoke about the necessity for a digital identity in the finance sector to develop some sort of financial services passport. By this I mean XXX

Now, whether we call it a Moolah Monicker, a Payment Persona or a Finance Face doesn’t matter: the identity his to create a persistent pseudonym that can be used for transactional purposes without disclosing any personally-identified information (PII).

GAIN

I made some practical suggestions about this earlier in the year and have continued to discuss the concept with potential stakeholders. I think it stacks up, but we’ll have to see how things develop.

The reason why I’m so keen on this approach is that banks already do the hard work of establishing customer identities for know-your-customer (KYC) purposes but they don’t then do anything with it. So identity is a cost centre, when there is an opportunity for it to be a platform for new products and services. I’m not the only person who thought that the DCMS age verification legislation would be the trigger for a sophisticated federated privacy-enhancing bank-centric ID.

Modifications to open banking could allow bank customers to share data on their identity and their date of birth with third parties in a double-blind way that stops their bank from knowing the site they want to visit, or the site they’re visiting from knowing their identity.

From Don’t let the government’s porn block create a monopoly – 1828. Well, whether it’s used for age verification or a pensions dashboard, I would have thought that what the European Commission Expert Group on Electronic Identification and Remote KYC Processes calls an “attribute-based LoA-rated KYC framework for the financial sector (ie, a financial services passport) would make a perfect post-Brexit stake-in-the-ground initiative to define the new era by boosting efficiency in the crucial Big Bank sector as well as providing a platform for new products and services for the Big Techs to develop. Talking of which…

 

I’d prefer to have an International Pseudonymity Day, but hey, perhaps that’s just me.

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In a recent article from the BBC, the UK’s competition watchdog has said ticket resale firms should face tighter rules. This includes clamping down on resellers who speculatively sell tickets they do not own, as well as restricting the operations of websites that seek to sell-on tickets at a profit.

Reacting to the news, Aventus’ CEO and Co-Founder Alan Vey, has told Digital Journal:

“Illegal reselling has always been one of the greatest problems facing the ticketing industry. As ticketed events are starting to resume, it’s no surprise that ticketing companies are under close scrutiny. There must be adequate measures in place to help minimise fraud and clean up the resale market.”

Vey explains that there are technological solutions to these types of problems, centered on blockchains: “This is where blockchain technology comes in. You’ve probably heard a lot about Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) over the course of 2021.”

From UK’s competition watchdog says ticket resale firms should face tighter rules – Digital Journal:

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The Telos Team uncovered a critical bug in its recent Ethereum Virtual Machine audit.

From Critical Ethereum Vulnerability Found by Telos EVM Audit Team By CoinQuora:

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A quantitative investigation of financial intermediation in the U.S. over the past 130 years basically says that the finance industry’s share of GDP is high in the 1920s, low in the 1960s, and high again after 1980. Deregulation does not seem to have reduced costs for the users of financial services.

Back in 2012m Thomas Philippon from the New York University Stern School of Business developed a quantitative interpretation of financial intermediation in the U.S. over the past 130 years. This showed that the unit cost of intermediation is now around 2% and in fact increased after the deregulation of the 1970s.