Snippings

According to Bank of Finland board member Tuomas Valimaki, several Nordic countries (incuding Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Estonia) are rolling out offline card payment systems to provide a back-up if internet connections are lost, including due to sabotage. Only 10% of people use cash as their primary payment method in Finland, central bank data shows, making the country highly dependent on card payments that require functioning international data links. More specifically 

Valimaki said the plans were still being developed, but offline payments can involve using terminals that encrypt and store transaction data until an internet connection can be restored.
Sweden’s central bank told Reuters that it hoped to establish a system by July 1, 2026, that would allow Swedes to make offline card payments to buy essential goods in the event of disruptions lasting up to seven days.
Central banks in Norway and Denmark said they had already launched offline electronic payments that they continue to develop.

From: Exclusive: Nordics and Estonia rolling out offline card payment back-up in case internet cut | Reuters.

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Speaking separately in Helsinki, NATO’s Head of Defence Planning Section, Christian-Marc Lilflander, said finance ministers should be more involved in discussions on security to better prepare for threats in financial services.

From: Exclusive: Nordics and Estonia rolling out offline card payment back-up in case internet cut | Reuters.

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Zelle, the popular peer-to-peer payment service, had a major breakdown on Friday, May 2, 2025, as customers of a number of banks discovered that they could not send or receive funds. The outage sparked a chain of complaints and confusion as consumers asked themselves what became of their money.

From: Zelle Outage 2025: Payments Fail for Major U.S. Banks.

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Stripe has introduced stablecoin-based accounts to clients in over 100 countries, allowing them to “to send, receive, and hold US-dollar stablecoin account balances” (in, for example, Circle’s USDC) which they note is “similar to how a traditional fiat bank account works”.

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For example, vaccination fraud has occurred where fraudsters phone the elderly and pretend they are from the healthcare services or an authority and will help them book a vaccination appointment. They then ask the person to login using their BankID, thus gaining access to the elderly persons bank account.

From: Social engineering.

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The European Commission will abandon plans to introduce rules requiring financial institutions to share information with customers and competitors after strong criticism from industry.
According to a document obtained by POLITICO, the Financial Data Access, or FiDA, regulation will be withdrawn within six months as it is “not aligned with Commission’s current objectives” and would introduce a “significant burden and complexity for financial actors” which goes against the EU executive’s goal to simplify rules.

From: Brussels U-turns on plans for more consumer financial data access – POLITICO.

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A Russian attack need not take the form of a missile strike. Just before the Paris Olympics, we saw the disruption that can be caused by arson attacks on the high-speed train network. While the perpetrators of this attack were not identified, we must not be naive about the hybrid threats we face. Ireland’s healthcare system was debilitated by a cyberattack from a Russian-based ransomware group in 2021. Russia’s military intelligence Unit 29155 has been behind sabotage campaigns across Europe. It expanded into cyberattacks in 2020, targeting critical infrastructure and government agencies across Nato, often with the aim of disrupting aid deliveries to Ukraine.

Europe needs to learn from Ukraine’s experience and step up its preparations. Well-maintained infrastructure and technology innovation such as quantum computing, AI and advanced cybersecurity are no longer just a question of economic competitiveness; they are critical for our defence and resilience. They should be given resources commensurate to these growing risks and to our total dependency on modern-day connectivity.

From: Europe’s critical infrastructure is becoming dangerously vulnerable.

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issues of payment failures with Zelle started coming in on Friday morning. Customers nationwide complained of failed transactions, pending payments, and frustration about not knowing where their money went.
Zelle later acknowledged the disruption in a statement, blaming the outage on a third-party glitch. The firm pointed fingers at Fiserv, one of the leading providers of banking technology, as the culprit.
Fiserv Blames Internal Issue

A Fiserv representative acknowledged the problem, saying that the company had an internal technical issue that impacted payment processing for multiple banks. The representative explained that this was not a cyber attack or some kind of malicious activity.

From: Zelle Outage 2025: Payments Fail for Major U.S. Banks.

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Norway’s giant $1.8tn oil fund expects to save a fifth of its annual trading costs by using artificial intelligence to trade less frequently and more efficiently, in a sign of how the technology could upend global finance.

Nicolai Tangen, chief executive of the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, told the Financial Times that it was targeting a saving of $400mn from its trading costs of $2bn each year, and it had already achieved close to $100mn.

“We have these AI programmes where you can predict [our buying and selling]. The goal is to save $400mn in trading costs a year — it’s huge numbers,” Tangen said. “Sometimes we buy a company on a Monday and sell it on a Friday because of index changes. Now you can predict this kind of things much better and you can internalise these flows,” he added.

The Norwegian fund is one of the biggest equity investors in the world, owning on average 1.5 per cent of every listed company globally, and it makes more than 46mn trades each year.

From: Norway’s oil fund targets $400mn trading cost savings using AI.

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A common thread is that stablecoin adoption is decoupling from broader crypto market cycles. When I bought my first stablecoin four years ago, it was as a gateway into crypto. It now offers much more than that. While cryptocurrency trading volumes fluctuate with market sentiment, stablecoin usage is growing steadily, driven by practical applications rather than speculation.

From: The New Money Market – by Marc Rubinstein – Net Interest.

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