Snippings

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Many top creators on OnlyFans now hire ghostwriters to write posts and reply to messages.

From: The Job Market Drove Gen Z Into Sex Work. Now Wages Are Drying up. – Business Insider.

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Once she selects the desired shoes, the agent offers to make the purchase for Julie and asks her to authenticate with her Passkey.

From: Visa Intelligent Commerce for Agents.

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In my book “The Currency Cold War” (LPP: 2020) I wrote that “There is a real marketplace logic to the trading of asset-backed currencies in the form of tokens and I expect to see an explosion of different kinds. Assuming that one important category of asset is central bank money, then this analysis suggests that the competition that needs to be considered will be between private asset-based currencies and public fiat-backed (or synthetic) currencies”. You can see from this that I had lazily categorosed public CBDCs and public stablecoins together when, as the passage of time has made clear, they are actually very different things.

Public CBDCs have very different requirements. Stablecoins are about economics, where as CBDCs are about economics, politics and social policy. CBDCs have to be available everyone, whereas stablecoins do not.

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The rewards are a big reason credit cards have become a cultural juggernaut among young Americans. As costs rise and the millennial subsidy fades, credit card rewards help a new generation live lifestyles they may not otherwise be able to afford: first-class flights, hotel rooms, and VIP concert experiences.

From: Credit Card Rewards and Points Like AmEx Give Gen Z Luxury Lifestyle – Business Insider.

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The importance of operational resilience as a key requirement is being amplified and enforced by regulatory changes in the UK and Europe—namely, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority’s Operational Resilience Mandate, which had a 31 March 2025 deadline, and the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) framework deadline, which was in January 2025.

From: (13) Resilience Reloaded: Modernising Bank Connections.

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But while “open banking” has found success in various corners of finance — such as by enabling faster lending decisions and new budgeting tools — it has so far failed to deliver the promise of powering a payments revolution.

From: Why Britain’s fintech dream is faltering.

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Taking advantage of this system requires diligence and restraint to avoid paying more in interest and fees than you gain in rewards.

From: Credit Card Rewards and Points Like AmEx Give Gen Z Luxury Lifestyle – Business Insider.

Now, I don’t have sufficient diligence or restraint to ensure that I get more in rewards than I pay out in frees. But a bot does. So what happens to these schemes when they are being used by bots, not people?

That Business Insider article also quotes a chap who says that every year he goes through his list of cards to see which ones paid for themselves and which ones did not, then he cancels the ones that do not wash their face. I don’t have time for that and even if I did I’d prefer to spend it playing Dungeons & Dragons. Bots, however, could do this day in and day out.

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👉 GenAI and Agents are the end of banking as we know it:

🔹 AI-led financial decision-making is shifting control from banks to digital platforms that act as financial gatekeepers. GenAI is a hyper-accelerant in this evolution—enabling more autonomous, seamless, and personalized experiences that pull activity away from traditional banking channels. Agentic AI will amplify these changes, making it even harder for banks to own the customer relationship.

🔹 AI-powered agents will optimize financial decisions in real time, making it easier for customers to switch providers and find better deals. Banks that once relied on stickiness will need new ways to earn loyalty.

🔹 AI-driven transparency will expose rate structures, fees, and lending terms in real time, eroding pricing power based on opacity. Banks will increasingly need to compete on financial value—offering transparent pricing—as well as intangible value: the timeliness and quality of their advice and how well they understand and anticipate customer needs.

From: For Banks The AI Reckoning Is Now.

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A 28-year-old Italian tourist was lured to a house in New York under false pretenses before a former business associate allegedly tried to extort millions from his crypto account. He was chained up, electrocuted, pistol-whipped and threatened with a chainsaw in order to get him to hand over his passwords.

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Social media should have a legal duty not to provide ad space to fraudsters in the first place. They ought to be expected to “know their customers” and be held liable, with proper enforcement and tough penalties, if they fail to block dissemination of fraudulent ads.

From: How to block the financial scammers on social media.

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