Snippings

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The bank, a subsidiary of electronics giant Sony, has enlisted Bastion, a financial institution for regulated stablecoin services, to help it roll out the offering next year.

Bastion will be the sole issuance provider and be responsible for reserve management and custody.

Sony plans to use the stablecoin to offer customers in-app digital currency payments for streaming and commerce in the entertainment sector, covering things like games, anime, movies and music. The firm is one of the largest video games players in the world, via its PlayStation Store, and also owns anime streaming platform Crunchyroll.

The token could also be used for Sony Group’s treasury operations and inter-company settlement, says Bastion.

From: Sony plans USD stablecoin.

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Recently, we estimate, the employment-weighted share of Americans using ai at work has fallen by a percentage point, and now sits at 11% (see chart 1). Adoption has fallen sharply at the largest businesses, those employing over 250 people. Three years into the generative-ai wave, demand for the technology looks surprisingly flimsy

From: Investors expect AI use to soar. That’s not happening.

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For decades, the global financial system has operated on a bifurcated model.

Messaging (Payment): The instruction to move value. This happens near-instantly. When a credit card is swiped, the authorization message travels from the merchant terminal to the issuer in milliseconds (ex ISO 8583, SWIFT, …etc)
Movement (Settlement): The actual transfer of funds between balance sheets. This happens days later, often involving batch processing, netting, and a chain of correspondent banks (nostro/vostro accounts).
This latency creates counterparty risk, traps liquidity in pre-funded accounts, and generates reconciliation friction that costs the global economy billions annually. Stablecoins flatten this hierarchy. In the stablecoin model, the issuer holds the omnibus account, becoming both the network and the ledger. The transfer of the token is the settlement. It is an atomic transaction where the messaging and the movement are identical and simultaneous.

From: Stablecoin Scenarios | Noyes Payments Blog.

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Perplexity’s view

Amazon should love this. Easier shopping means more transactions and happier customers. But Amazon doesn’t care. They’re more interested in serving you ads, sponsored results, and influencing your purchasing decisions with upsells and confusing offers.

From: Bullying is Not Innovation.

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Consumers are largely ambivalent.

They don’t benefit from lower fees.

They don’t benefit from faster settlements.

And consumers definitely lose out from the lack of a chargeback mechanism.

From: Why Ryanair wants you to Pay by Bank | Payments Culture.

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Tinder has announced that its newly introduced identity-verification feature, Face Check, has led to a 60 % decline in exposure to so-called “bad actors” on the platform. The safety measure – a short video-selfie biometric check powered by FaceTec – is now required for new users in California and seven other countries, with broader U.S. expansion planned in the coming months.

According to a press release issued by Match Group, the rollout of Face Check has produced early results showing more than a 60 % reduction in exposure to potentially deceptive profiles, along with a more than 40 % drop in user-reported incidents involving such accounts. The system works by matching a user’s live video selfie to existing profile photos and detecting duplicate faces across multiple accounts. When successfully verified, the user receives a “Photo Verified” badge.

From: Tinder Sees 60% Drop in Bad Actors After Face ID Launch – Global Dating Insights.

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The Internet Trust Layer (ITL) should be built for a machine-speed economy, moving toward a world of streaming finance and continuous compliance.

From: The Death of the Wallet – by Timo Hotti.

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Recently, we estimate, the employment-weighted share of Americans using ai at work has fallen by a percentage point, and now sits at 11% (see chart 1). Adoption has fallen sharply at the largest businesses, those employing over 250 people. Three years into the generative-ai wave, demand for the technology looks surprisingly flimsy

From: Investors expect AI use to soar. That’s not happening.

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A paper by Yvonne Chen of ShanghaiTech University and colleagues refers to “genai’s mediocrity trap”. With the assistance of the tech, people can produce something “good enough”. This helps weaker workers. But the paper finds it can harm the productivity of better ones, who decide to work less hard.

From: Investors expect AI use to soar. That’s not happening.

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A company director has pleaded guilty to supplying counterfeit plane parts, which led to the grounding of hundreds of flights across the world.
Jose Alejandro Zamora Yrala, 37, from Virginia Water, Surrey, admitted defrauding customers while operating UK-based AOG Technics between January 2019 and December 2023. Zamora Yrala admitted falsifying documentation that related to the origin, status or condition of aircraft parts.

From: Surrey man admits part in scam which grounded international flights – BBC News.

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