Snippings

I have not been to the Reflect Festival in Cyprus before, but I know a few people who had been before and they’d told me that it was interesting and a little bit different. Well, they were right and I had the opportunity to experience it for myself this year when I went to support one of our customers, the secure online payments company payabl, who were sponsors of the Money Stage at the festival this year.

The festival itself is quite a dynamic mix of start-ups and investors across a whole bunch of industries, not only fintech, and it was fun walking around seeing where the energy was coming from, and I apologise for the tired cliché, this crossroads between Europe and the Middle East.

I was invited to joint the Money Stage this year to give a talk setting out some of the key ideas around agentic commerce and to take part in a panel that explored the real-world impact of AI across the fintech ecosystem—how it is being applied today, what is needed to scale it responsibly, and where it is heading next. I had a great line up to discuss the issues: the payabl CTO Thekla Pashali, the Torus CEO Kirill Listitsyn and the future of finance expert Meirav Harel. We covered issues from data infrastructure and compliance to ethical considerations and innovation opportunities, the session will unpack the critical questions facing fintechs as AI moves from potential to practice.

I really enjoyed taking part in such an interesting discussion in front of such an engaged audience. Meirev summarised the key message as “banks must move now”, noting that if they don’t develop AI interfaces to their own services, Big Tech will. And when that happens, she says, traditional financial institutions risk becoming invisible—pushed to the background with irrelevant interfaces. She also discussed, along with Thekla and Kirill about the need for those of us on the technology side to spend a little more time thinking about the ethical frameworks that need to be in place to ensure that the benefits of the transition to bot powered business are distributed fairly.

If I were to add to this excellent summary, I would say (and it will be no surprise to you to hear this) that we really do need a stronger digital identity infrastructure in this space to stop the frauds, scams and malpractice from the real world from infesting the emerging ecosystem. Given the urgent need for such an infrastructure, my colleagues across Consult Hyperion and Fime are ctually quite optimistic because of the new security technologies that we have at our disposal (to give AI agents real security).

Sincere thanks to payabl for facilitating such interesting and educational discussions in the Limassol sunshine!

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A California judge slammed a pair of law firms for the undisclosed use of AI after he received a supplemental brief with “numerous false, inaccurate, and misleading legal citations and quotations.” In a ruling submitted last week,

From: Judge slams lawyers for ‘bogus AI-generated research’ | The Verge.

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Or there’s the Belgian man who posted online that “his crypto wallet was now worth €1.6 million.” His wife was the victim of an attempted abduction within weeks.

From: We have reached the “severed fingers and abductions” stage of the crypto revolution – Ars Technica.

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Fortune India

 

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The objective of UPI was to create an indigenous Indian system. In contrast, two US-headquartered companies—Walmart and Google—dominate the space now. Even Amazon and WhatsApp, both headquartered in the US, are trying to get a shoo-in.

From: PhonePe outage rekindles debate on UPI market cap: Should NPCI finally act?.

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In the UK, consumers have been warned again about “cloning scams”, where criminals duplicate a legitimate company’s website, email or a fake WhatsApp group to persuade consumers to send them payments, after these scams grew by half last year.

The growth of these kinds of frauds are inevitable in an environment that lacks even the most rudimentary identity infrastructure and is yet another reason why the advent of consumer agents to handle financial services, automated personal treasury deparsmenrs, cannot come soon enough. Whereas scammers might be able to copy an investment bank’s graphics and text, they cannot copy its digital signatures or verifiable credentials. Even the most basic AI-powered consumer CFO would be able to spot the scam.

In May 2025, the Indian mobile payment service PhonePe (which along with Gpay handles more than four-fifths of the country’s mobile payments) went down. There was a network failure because of cybersecurity exercises associated with India-Pakistan tensions, meaning that consumers were unable to make payments or transfer funds. The outage rekindled debates around the over-dependence of the UPI ecosystem (which last month handled 18 billion transactions) on relatively few key players, and foreign-owned players at that (PhonePe is owned byy Walmart and GPay is Google), not simply from a business perspective but as source of systemic risk.

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Bridge’s launch of Stablecoin issuance APIs was drowned in the sea of announcements last week but are worth double clicking on. They allow developers to issue USDB, its internal stablecoin, or spin up white-labeled stablecoins backed 1:1 by USDB. Developers keep most of the yield, and conversions to and from USDC are instant and free.

It is a clean API-first model, but not a new one. Brale already offers this ability across multiple chains. M^0 has enabled over $200M in white-labeled stablecoins like USDN and UsualM. What Bridge brings is distribution. Backed by Stripe and already powering products like stablecoin financial accounts, Bridge could bring this model to a much broader developer base.

More importantly, this launch signals a broader shift: stablecoin issuance is becoming commoditized infrastructure. It is no longer a high-friction product. It is a low-friction primitive. As it becomes easier to launch, operate, and shut down a stablecoin, more developers will use them to solve narrow problems: internal treasury flows, user rewards, marketplace tokens, and closed-loop payments.

Distribution remains the critical challenge, both for the platforms like Bridge and Brale, and for the developers issuing stablecoins. Closed ecosystems, where developers control the user base, are the most obvious fit. In these environments, developers can abstract away minting, burning, and conversion, and capture yield in the process. Open systems are harder. Liquidity and acceptance still favor incumbents like USDC.

From: The Weekly Stable (Vol 17).

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In. January 2025 alone, Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport confiscated 984 counterfeit licenses in less than a week. As Steve Bansbach, a federal Customs and Border Protection spokesman, commented on this, this is about a bigger threat than just kids getting alcohol: the idea that these cards could be used in identity theft and human trafficking.

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Nomi is among a growing number of AI companion platforms that let their users create personalized chatbots to take on the roles of AI girlfriend, boyfriend, parents, therapist, favorite movie personalities, or any other personas they can dream up. Users can specify the type of relationship they’re looking for (Nowatzki chose “romantic”) and customize the bot’s personality traits (he chose “deep conversations/intellectual,” “high sex drive,” and “sexually open”) and interests (he chose, among others, Dungeons & Dragons, food, reading, and philosophy).

The companies that create these types of custom chatbots—including Glimpse AI (which developed Nomi), Chai Research, Replika, Character.AI, Kindroid, Polybuzz, and MyAI from Snap, among others—tout their products as safe options for personal exploration and even cures for the loneliness epidemic. Many people have had positive, or at least harmless, experiences. However, a darker side of these applications has also emerged, sometimes veering into abusive, criminal, and even violent content; reports over the past year have revealed chatbots that have encouraged users to commit suicide, homicide, and self-harm.

From: An AI chatbot told a user how to kill himself—but the company doesn’t want to “censor” it | MIT Technology Review.

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I think some things will change if you come from an eIDAS II- perspective.  I hope that we can make it easier for businesses to use the wallets, especially to ensure that they can be server based in a good way. The eIDAS II is very much built with natural persons in mind so it does not always fit businesses or other organisations.

David Magård, Senior Advisor at the Swedish Companies Registration Office (16th April 2025)