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The 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) on Saturday announced 2027 as the new date to launch its single currency, the “eco.”

From ECOWAS: West African bloc aims to launch single currency in 2027 | News | DW | 19.06.2021:

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Deutsche Bank AG DB +1.20% wants to get back into the suddenly valuable business of digital payments, nearly a decade after getting out of it.

Germany’s largest lender is setting up a joint venture with U.S. payments giant Fiserv Inc. FISV +0.73% to offer customers payments-processing services. The joint venture will allow Deutsche Bank’s business clients to accept payments from customers, both in person and digitally, through Fiserv’s platform called Clover, which reads credit cards, debit cards and mobile wallets, and records orders and inventory.

Deutsche Bank is eager to re-enter the payments market after it sold the business in 2012 to the U.S.-based EVO Payments International LLC.

From Deutsche Bank Jumps Back Into Payments With Fiserv Deal – WSJ:

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The 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) on Saturday announced 2027 as the new date to launch its single currency, the “eco.”

From ECOWAS: West African bloc aims to launch single currency in 2027 | News | DW | 19.06.2021:

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I am thinking about creating a website that will reduce the risk of getting dumped.

This website will let you and your partner submit a relationship deposit into a joint cyptocurrency account. To withdraw your relationship deposit, this account will require that both you and your partner enter your separate private passwords.

From Website will help to reduce risk of getting dumped:

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London’s Volt is the latest to catch the investors’ eye, having raised a $23.5m Series A, led by EQT Ventures, with the aim of aggregating this new payment method into one global network. It’s the largest European Series A round in open banking to date.

Other London-based companies to raise in the space are fellow newcomer Trilo, which just raised a £1m pre-seed round, and Banked, which has raised $12m to date and is currently raising again (largely from US investors) to build out its ‘Pay by Bank’ facility.

Each of them lets users make account-to-account (A2A) payments at the checkout using open banking, following in the footsteps of localised initiatives like Sweden’s Trustly (now a multibillion-dollar frontrunner) and Ireland’s Nuapay.

These newcomers are betting that cards have had their heyday, arguing that they are expensive, clunky, and also risky (card fraud in Europe hit $1.55bn last year).

From Can these payment startups rival Mastercard and Visa? Investors think so | Sifted:

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Competition is heating up elsewhere too. The early open banking players like Tink, Plaid and TrueLayer — who began by offering data connectivity  — have now all quickly begun branching into the payments space.

From Can these payment startups rival Mastercard and Visa? Investors think so | Sifted:

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Leading Chinese banks have introduced digital yuan withdrawals at more than 3,000 ATM locations in Beijing. Residents of the capital city will now be able to exchange their e-CNY funds for cash and vice versa.

From Over 3,000 ATMs in Beijing Offer Digital Yuan Withdrawals – Bitcoin News:

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Shop Pay increases checkout speed by 4x, but that’s not all. We, on the Financial Solutions team at Shopify, love our numbers, so we decided to dive a bit further into Shop Pay and its performance on checkout… Our study showed that checkouts going through Shop Pay have an average checkout-to-order rate of 1.72x times higher than those going through regular checkouts.

From Shop Pay: The Best-Converting Checkout on the Internet (2021):

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the National Crime Agency (NCA) estimates the total annual cost of serious organised crime in the UK economy to be around £37 billion, “so the cost of complying is not too far behind the cost of the crime itself.”

From AML regulations driving up compliance costs across UK:

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For three years until his departure in January, Simon McLaren served as the director of communications for Blade, the urban-aviation startup that went public earlier this year at a valuation of more than $800 million. His work in that time was largely what you’d expect of a company spokesperson — except for the fact that Simon McLaren doesn’t actually exist.

After Insider sought to verify McLaren’s identity, Blade CEO Rob Wiesenthal acknowledged in an interview that McLaren was a made-up persona invented by him and his colleagues and that Wiesenthal masqueraded as McLaren in telephone conversations with news outlets. The ruse lasted for years, duped numerous journalists, and included a puzzling public drama around McLaren’s purported departure from Blade. None of it was real.

From Helicopter App Blade Used a Fake Spokesperson for 3 Years.

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