Snippings

The writer is European head of banks research at Morgan Stanley

MAGDALENA STOKLOSA  

The banks have moved towards less capital-intensive activity, earning fees from the transactions of clients and managing risk for them.

More broadly, there are now megatrends in play that will support the transition of banks’ revenue streams from net interest income on lending to fees.

In Europe, financing is gradually moving away from universal banks to capital markets.

From The market is overlooking the change in Europe’s investment banks | Financial Times:

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There is some faintly bizarre about the US leading the charge for electronic payments, decentralised finance and stableclins while at the same time running out of pennies.

But a combination of factors — including government stimulus payments, accelerated consumer spending and the threat of the COVID-19 delta variant — has stymied progress and forced retailers to resort again to asking shoppers for exact change.

From Coin shortage redux: Banks, merchants again searching for pennies | American Banker:

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Bitcoin plunges Libya into darkness

Libya suffers from a steady deficit in electricity supply,

in Libya, where the price of household electricity does not exceed $ 004.0 per kWh, which is well below the world average price of $0.138 per kWh, as the price of electricity supplied to businesses is not much different as it doesn’t exceed US$0.008 per kWh with a global average of US$0.123 per kWh; Thus, Libya ranks second in the world in terms of cheap electricity, after Venezuela.

From How Bitcoin mining aggravated deterioration in Libya | 218 News:

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While the UK comes up a with a variety of ways to cling on to cash, in advanced nations such as India the government is bypassing the financial system completely with it’s new RUPI scheme for distributing support to its citizens. Instead of sending people a cheque, or a prepaid card, or whatever, so they can go and buy some rice, the government is sending codes directly to citizen’s phones so that they can go to the shop and pick up the rice directly.

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Like in other prepaid instruments, the maximum limit for a UPI prepaid voucher has been pegged at Rs 10,000 or as prescribed by the regulator. To ensure that the voucher is used only for specified goods or services, it will contain a designated merchant code. This will ensure that a vaccine voucher can be used only for purchase of vaccines, or a foodgrain voucher is used only in the public distribution system.

From NPCI issues guidelines for prepaid UPI e-vouchers – Times of India.

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Last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled a new digital payment mode called e-RUPI under the country’s UPI (Unified Payments Interface).

The digital payment actually comes in the form of a pre-paid e-voucher from UPI.

How it works is that the e-voucher can be issued after a simple verification of a mobile number and identity. Instead of a cash deposit into a bank account or digital wallet or app, the pre-paid voucher will be issued in the form of a QR code or SMS string-based e-voucher to the recipient’s mobile number.

From India’s new digital payment e-RUPI is not what you think it is – Tech Wire Asia.

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As voice cloning technology has become ever more effective, it is of increasing interest to actors… and cybercriminals.
When Tim Heller first heard his cloned voice he says it was so accurate that “my jaw hit the floor… it was mind-blowing”.

Mr Heller, a 29-year-old voiceover artist and actor from Texas, does everything from portraying cartoon characters, narrating audio books and documentaries, speaking on video games, and the voiceovers on film trailers.
He says he recently turned to voice cloning to “future proof” his career.
He says it may enable him to secure more work. For example, if he is ever double-booked, he could offer to send his voice clone to do one of the jobs instead.

From Voice cloning of growing interest to actors and cybercriminals – BBC News:

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On a webinar hosted by the Human Rights Commission, a number of civil and digital rights advocates backed recent calls for a moratorium on the use of facial recognition technology in government decision making until appropriate privacy protections are enshrined in law.

From Experts back facial recognition moratorium – InnovationAus:

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“For Ant and Tencent, it’s risky to encourage the development of e-CNY, but it’s even more risky to stay on the sidelines,” said Eswar Prasad, a former head of the International Monetary Fund’s China division.

From China’s Digital Yuan Puts Ant and Tencent in an Awkward Spot – WSJ.

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A decade back, a massive earthquake struck the northeast coast of Japan’s Honshu Island. It triggered a massive tsunami that sent waves towering a hundred feet above ground inland. They went crashing into cities, towns and villages devastating more than 200 square miles.

As workers and residents pick through the wreckage, they are increasingly stumbling upon cash and locked safes.

From Japanese citizens turning in cash found in tsunami zone as people’s life savings wash up | Daily Mail Online:

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Yasuo Kimura, 67, considers himself one of the lucky ones. The tsunami swallowed and gutted his home in Onagawa, about 50 miles  south of Ofunato. He escaped with his 90-year-old father and the clothes on his back. But he still has money in the bank.

That’s not the case for many of his longtime friends and acquaintances, said Kimura, a former bank employee.

‘I spent my career trying to convince them to deposit their money in a bank,’ he said, staring out at his flattened city. ‘They always thought it was safer to keep it at home.’

From Japanese citizens turning in cash found in tsunami zone as people’s life savings wash up | Daily Mail Online:

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In the five months since the disaster struck, people have turned in thousands of wallets found in the debris, containing $48 million in cash.

From Honest Japanese Return $78 Million in Cash Found in Quake Rubble – ABC News:

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Police have attributed the unusually large number of safes to a preference for cash transactions among fishermen, who make up a large portion of the population affected by the disaster. Many safes also contained the documents that businesses will need to rebuild: bank books, stock certificates, land rights deeds, and gold bars and other precious metals.

From Japanese tsunami victims reunited with their cash and valuables | Japan disaster | The Guardian:

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This fascinates me, because one of the common arguments made about electronic payments is that they are no good in an emergency and so we should always keep cash as a backup.

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However, those four goals raise at least a dozen contradictory problems, as pithily outlined in a CBDC design competition currently being run by the Monetary Authority of Singapore and partners. Can a retail CBDC system “adequately trace transactions, limit the loss or support the recovery of lost funds without compromising user identity?” And, can a retail CBDC be “flexible yet robust?”

From How the Fed’s digital currency could displace crypto | Financial Times:

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NVIDIA Morpheus is an open AI application framework that provides cybersecurity developers with a highly optimized AI pipeline and pre-trained AI capabilities that, for the first time, allow them to instantaneously inspect all IP traffic across their data center fabric

From Morpheus AI Cybersecurity Framework | NVIDIA Developer:

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This time, it’s phishing emails. In a small study, researchers found that they could use the deep learning language model GPT-3, along with other AI-as-a-service platforms, to significantly lower the barrier to entry for crafting spearphishing campaigns at a massive scale.

From AI Wrote Better Phishing Emails Than Humans in a Recent Test | WIRED:

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They were surprised to find that more people clicked the links in the AI-generated messages than the human-written ones—by a significant margin.

From AI Wrote Better Phishing Emails Than Humans in a Recent Test | WIRED:

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