Snippings

The trend toward “embedded finance”, whereby the provision of financial services becomes a part of some other customer proposition rather than a distinct proposition of the financial services provider, has been clear for some time but seems to me to be accelerating as the spread of open banking around the globe makes it easier for third parties of all kinds to incorporate finance. My good friend Sophie Guibuad phrased this rather well recently, saying that for the next generation of consumers, banking will be something that you ‘do’ with your favourite brands rather than your chosen bank.

From The rise of embedded finance: It’s the end of fintech (as we know it) – AltFi.

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For Crypto.com, it means that it can send USDC directly to Visa. For instance, if a Crypto.com customer holds USDC in their wallet and makes a card transaction, Crypto.com doesn’t have to first convert USDC tokens to USD.

It can send USDC to Visa’s Ethereum wallet address at Anchorage to settle the transaction. The merchant then gets paid by Visa in their own currency.

From Visa supports transaction settlement with USDC stablecoin | TechCrunch:

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Critics of the Westpac strategy point out that banking licences, capital and software are plentiful and stepping away from customer engagement in favour of supplying banking infrastructure presents a risk to the bank’s retail franchise.

From Westpac expands ‘banking as a service’, diverging from CBA strategy.

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Westpac Banking Corp has added another component to its banking-as-a-service (BaaS) strategy, adding regtech start-up FrankieOne as its identification service to allow users such as Afterpay and SocietyOne to quickly and seamlessly on-board new banking customers.

Westpac chief executive Peter King. James Brickwood
FrankieOne has assembled a variety of “know your client”, fraud and identity services that will sit alongside 10X Future Technologies’ cloud-based core banking ledger, and – along with Westpac’s banking licence – can be rented out by non-banks. This will allow banking outsiders to provide banking services in competition with Westpac and other banks.

From Westpac expands ‘banking as a service’, diverging from CBA strategy.

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900 convicted sex offenders have paid £15 to change their names by deed poll

From Thousands of sex criminals could be working with children after changing names, warns Sajid Javid | Daily Mail Online:

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This only goes to reinforce my prejudice that there’s no earthly reason to store a person’s name in the national identity register.  The register should be a place to store the things that are unique, that uniquely identify you: your biometrics, for example, and your unique national identity number.  Your name should be treated as nothing more than a mildly interesting characteristic: it does not identify you in any way.

From Names are confusing in the UK – Consult Hyperion:

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Ministers could be stopped from using self-destructing messages to conduct government business, following a legal challenge supported by an alliance of transparency campaigners and university archivists.

WhatsApp recently introduced the option for users to make messages permanently disappear for both the sender and the recipient after seven days. Its privacy-focussed rival, Signal, used by many Conservative MPs, has had a similar function for some time.

From Legal challenge seeks to stop ministers sending disappearing messages | Law | The Guardian.

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In 2014, two academic papers were published: one by Ferdinando Ametrano called “Hayek Money: The Cryptocurrency Price Stability Solution,” and another by Robert Sams titled “A Note on Cryptocurrency Stabilisation: Seigniorage Shares.”

Drawing on Friedrich Hayek’s critique of the Gold Standard, Ametrano argues that Bitcoin, because of its deflationary nature, cannot adequately perform the unit-of-account function that we require of a currency. Instead, he proposes a rules-based, supply-elastic cryptocurrency that “rebases” (i.e. changes the money supply pro rata across all token holders) according to demand.

In “Seigniorage Shares,” Sams puts forth a similar model with a similar justification, but with an important twist. Instead of a “rebasing” currency, in which changes to the money supply are distributed pro rata across all wallets, Sams’s system consists of two tokens: the supply-elastic currency itself and investment “shares” of the network. Owners of the latter asset, which Sams calls “seigniorage shares,” are the sole receptors of inflationary rewards from positive supply increases and the sole bearers of the debt burden when demand for the currency falls and the network contracts.

Astute crypto observers will recognize that Ametrano’s “Hayek Money” and Sams’s “Seigniorage Shares” are no longer academic abstractions. “Hayek Money” is nearly identical to Ampleforth, a protocol that launched in 2019 and rocketed in July 2020 to a fully-diluted market capitalization of over $1 billion. More recently, Sams’s “Seigniorage Shares” model has, to varying degrees, served as a foundation for Basis, Empty Set Dollar, Basis Cash, and Frax.

From Stability, Elasticity, and Reflexivity: A Deep Dive into Algorithmic Stablecoins – Deribit Insights:

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Today, most banks are neither platforms nor ecosystems, though many have ambitions to head in that direction.

From Platforms vs ecosystems – Comment & Profiles –.

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A key objective of China’s sovereign digital currency is to maintain financial stability should “something happen” to Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay, the two private platforms that dominate the nation’s vast digital payment market, the country’s central bank has said.

From China digital currency to ‘provide backup’ for Alipay, Tencent’s WeChat Pay if ‘something happens’ to internet giants | South China Morning Post:

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Despite the promises of digitisation, the implemented changes fall short. None of the three digitisation measures mentioned above facilitate the addition of names to ration cards. In fact, we found that there was no official system to pass information regarding the deletion of the names of married women from their parents’ ration card to the Panchayats in the districts where their marital home was situated. None of the officials we spoke to knew of the existence of a process for this kind of portability in case of marriage.

From Failures in the digitisation of India’s food security programme: the exclusion of married women of Odisha | Privacy International:

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