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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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Criminals may have stolen as much as half of the unemployment benefits the U.S. has been pumping out over the past year, some experts say.

From Half of the pandemic’s unemployment money may have been stolen – Axios.

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Dinero Electrónico was a mobile payment system developed by the Banco Central del Ecuador that allowed citizens to transfer USD balances in real-time from person to person using basic cell phones. The program operated between 2014 and 2018. Key drivers of the program were increasing financial inclusion and reducing the need for the central bank to hold and distribute large quantities of USD notes. We discuss reasons why the program was ultimately discontinued, including opposition to the program from private banks, and outline lessons learned.

From Dinero Electrónico: The rise and fall of Ecuador’s central bank digital currency – ScienceDirect:

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I’m certain ransomware victims and their insurers would pay $1 million to a service that would undo a $5 million payment

From How to Start Disrupting Cryptocurrencies: “Mining” Is Money Transmission – Lawfare:

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The cryptocurrency community remarks that the mining system is “decentralized”—that is, because there are many participants, this implies that no single participant is responsible. Yet because every given transaction is validated by the winning block creator, that winning miner is the money transmitter for that transaction

From How to Start Disrupting Cryptocurrencies: “Mining” Is Money Transmission – Lawfare:

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Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency “miners” aren’t just creating new cryptocurrency or securing the network. They are also specifically acting as money transmitters and need to be treated that way. The U.S. government, especially the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), needs to pay attention.

From How to Start Disrupting Cryptocurrencies: “Mining” Is Money Transmission – Lawfare:

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“While the government did approach us for assistance on bitcoin, this is not something the World Bank can support given the environmental and transparency shortcomings.”

Earlier on Wednesday, Salvadoran Finance Minister Alejandro Zelaya said the Central America country had sought technical assistance from the Bank as it seeks to use bitcoin as a parallel legal tender alongside the U.S. dollar.

From World Bank rejects El Salvador request for help on bitcoin implementation | Reuters:

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Real data is messy and riddled with bias. New data privacy regulations make it hard to collect. By contrast, synthetic data is pristine and can be used to build more diverse data sets. You can produce perfectly labeled faces, say, of different ages, shapes, and ethnicities to build a face-detection system that works across populations.

From These creepy fake humans herald a new age in AI | MIT Technology Review:

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