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Big banks are concerned about being forced to bear extra costs that could disadvantage them if they are not also applied to new rivals.

From UK banks face block on high street branch closures | Financial Times.

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According to Accenture, only 43% of customers say they trust banks to help them look after their long-term financial health.

From Financial Institution Marketing Is Failing to Curb Customer Outflow.

I am surprised it is as high as 43%, frankly.

John Herrman, writing in the New York Times, frame the issue succinctly: there is scant evidence that “real name” policies mitigate abuse but there is plenty of evidence suggesting that forcing people to expose more private information can intensify it.

 

What followed early, credentialed online spaces was, in retrospect, an accidental golden era of online identity construction — a widely accessible web where people adopted handles and chose email addresses, logged into chat rooms and chose their own web domains.

 

Today, it’s hard to overstate just how thoroughly connected a typical internet user’s various identities — legal, chosen, assigned — have become. There are obvious examples in services like LinkedIn, where one’s public-facing, searchable professional identity is associated with their social identities elsewhere. Platforms that ask for legal names are woven through countless other social networks, shopping sites and commenting systems through unified login features. Facial-recognition technologythreatens to tie together all of our identities, everywhere and always.

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Christian Catalini (the Chief Economist of the Diem Association) and Jai Massari suggest that CBDCs and private-sector stablecoins are strong complements, not substitutes. This makes a lot of sense to me. Their view that the public sector could focus on issuing digital coins while the private sector builds rails and applications is practical, and as they point out, competition with legacy networks (rather than building on top of them) would ensure a better resilience and more innovation.

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Watkins is one of millions across the United States who are being instructed to use ID.me, along with its facial recognition software, to get their unemployment benefits. A rapidly growing number of US states, including Colorado, California and New York, turned to ID.me in hopes of cutting down on a surge of fraudulent claims for state and federal benefits that cropped up during the pandemic alongside a tidal wave of authentic unemployment claims.

From ID me: More states requiring facial recognition for unemployment benefits | WRAL TechWire:

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Professor Olivier Blanchard of the Peterson Institute of International Economics and a former chief economist of the IMF, found he could not get excited by the prospect. “I may miss the vision thing. [Central bank digital currencies] may improve the plumbing [of the financial system]. But to me, it seems like much ado about not much,” he said.

From How would a Bank of England digital currency work? | Financial Times:

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Crypto also offers something deeper and more gratifying than a regular investment. It offers meaning. The more time you spend in a cryptocurrency chat the more elements it seems to share with a religious sect.

From Going for Broke in Cryptoland – The New York Times:

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Wesley Pessano Santarem died in the shooting as he drove his red Porsche Boxster through the streets of Brazilian city Sao Pedro da Aldeia.

The killing of Mr Pessano, who was known for promoting his financial success and lifestyle on social media, took place in front of witnesses in broad daylight.

Mr Passano, 19, had reportedly made his fortune in Bitcoin in the past three years.

From Teen crypto trader and investment influencer found shot dead in his Porsche:

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Commerzbank was already trialling blockchain-based machine-to-machine payments (between electric charging points and Daimler Trucks) back in 2019 and the 22 members of the newly formed Franco-German GAIA-X non-profit association that is developing common requirements for a pan-European data infrastructure (a platform for joining up cloud-hosting services so that business can move their data freely and protected under European privacy laws) able support IoT are already exploring what they call “Pay-per-Use Supply Chain Finance”. This is designed to address the increasing complexity of supply chains and to address the problems of liquidity bottlenecks that put the stability of the entire supply chain at risk. It does not take much imagination to see machines in smart factories (the global smart factory market is expected to double by 2025) negotiating across global supply networks and paying each free from credit risk.

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Global Smart Factory Market is set to grow from its current market value of more than $75 billion (€66 billion) to over $155 billion (€138 billion) by 2025; according to a new research report by Global Market Insights, Inc.

From Smart factory market to cross US$155 bn by 2025 | IoT Now News & Reports:

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