Snippings

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Portable identity enables people to safely and securely re-use their verified identity across financial services and other organisations, so that they don’t need to be re-verified every time they want to access new services.

From Onfido, Deloitte and Evernym Prove that Re-usable Digital Identity is Market-Ready with the FCA Regu:

So, a customer presents a passport or driving licence to open an account at Bank A. Onfido verify the documents and Evernym create a digital identity that is then stored on a blockchain by Deloitte. Then, when the customer wants to open another account at Bank B, they do not need to present the documents again, they simply point Bank B at the digital identity on the blockchain. Bank B knows that the identity has been verified by Bank A, so they do not need to verify the documents again. This saves everyone time and money.

It’s a timely demonstration of where the industry might go next. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global inter-governmental money laundering and terrorist financing (ML/TF) watchdog, recently published its new “Guidance on Digital ID” (6th March 2020). These aim to encourage governments and financial institutions to use the FATF’s risk-based approach to “encourage use of digital customer onboarding” and to take advantage of “simplified due diligence” to tackle the challenges of COVD-19 whilst remaining alert to “new and emerging” risks.

What is particularly interesting about the new guidelines is that, in common with the EU’s Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLV), they recognise that there is role of digital onboarding beyond convenience or necessity. Paragraph 87 of the document says very clearly that given the advances in the technology and standards in the digital ID world that “non-face-to-face customer-identification and transactions that rely on reliable, independent digital ID systems with appropriate risk mitigation measures in place, may present a standard level of risk, and may even be lower-risk (my emphasis) where higher assurance levels (eg, NIST IAL2) are implemented and/or appropriate ML/TF risk control measures are in place.

Of course, digital and “face-to-face” are not alternatives. The use of digital onboarding to support and enhance face-to-face interactions to also going to accelerate. Here’s an example from Canada. In March 2020, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) introduced an enhancement to its mobile application to allow customers to verify their identities when opening a new account in branches. The app can use the contactless interfaces in mobile phones to read the chips in electronic passports to speed things along. Why bother? Well, RBC say that when a customer verifies their identity this way, there details are immediately flashed to the computer screen of the RBC employee helping them, so giving “a stronger connection between the branch and the app” and cutting the account opening time by more than two-thirds.

Since the FATF made the new recommendations, regulators around the world have issued their own statements supporting such action including the UK’s FCA, Hong Kong’s HKMA and the US FinCEN as James Mirfin of Refinitiv pointed out. In the UK, for example, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) issued a letter noting that while organisations have to meet their obligations under the relevant regulations (in this case, the UK’s Money Laundering Regulations 2017), they can be flexible. Now, some of this flexibility is a little old school (allowing people to send scanned documents as PDFs by e-mail instead of producing original documents, for example, is what I label “digitised identity”) but some of it is, I think, a considered and sound response to the new environment.

The FCA have said that they will accept “third-party verification” (where a lawyer or accountant corroborates data) and, in a step towards the federated digital identity of the future (the “financial services passport” that I have been going on about for years), organisations can rely on CDD performed by other organisations (the example given is the obvious one of customer’s primary bank account provider) and on commercial providers who “triangulate” data sources to verify documentation. This is why the sandbox experiment is so timely. We may be about to see a step change in the costs

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Although Twitter removed the “Antifa” tweet and the account, its digital shadow continues to stretch across the internet.

From The Anatomy of a Fake Antifa Tweet – OneZero:

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On June 2, Twitter disclosed that an account suspended for inciting violence was the work of a far-right white nationalist organization known as Identity Evropa. The group had created a Twitter account, @ANTIFA_US, that claimed to be part of the anti-fascist movement known as “Antifa.”

From The Anatomy of a Fake Antifa Tweet – OneZero:

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CaixaBank is the world’s first bank to create ATMs with effortlessly and securely integrated biometric technology.

From CaixaBank deploys ATMs with facial recognition technology throughout Spain:

Excuse me, but I don’t think so. When my sister worked for Nationwide Building Society, she loved using their cardless biometric ATM and that was more than two decades ago! But actually there’s another reason why this headline caught my eye, and it is this: as the COVID crisis has accelerated the trend toward a cashless economy (apparently the average Brit has now gone 44 days without using cash) so making fancy additions to ATMs starts to look a little like designing new deckchairs on the Titanic.

The economics of ATM networks start to look very shaky once the transaction volumes start to fall. The machines are expensive to install (and to replace in places such as Philadelphia where they are being blown up at an alarming rate) and it costs money to distribute money: someone is paying for security guards and armoured trucks and so on (it’s you, by the way). This is why John Howells (the CEO of Link, which runs 70,000 ATMs in th UK) said cash could be “almost killed off” by the end of the summer. When the lockdown began, cash was still used in around a third of transactions but Link predicts its use will slump to just 10 per cent by August.

This, as you can imagine, has significant ramifications. Consumers face higher charges, for one thing, as the cost of the network is spread over fewer transactions. In the UK, the amount paid by consumers to take cash out of ATMs rose by £29m to £104m last year as many free machines were withdrawn or converted to charge fees, while not having to maintain so many machines saved the banks £120m.

ATMs are one way of distributing cash to consumers, but only one way. Retailers are another, and if customers come in to get cash then that saves the retailers from having to bank that cash, so that’s a good thing.

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Small business sellers who sell using Amazon’s platform will “soon” receive an invitation to apply for credit lines up to $1 million through Marcus, Goldman’s consumer banking arm, CNBC reports.

From Amazon Partners With Goldman Sachs On Small Business Credit Lines:

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WhatsApp Pay, like its competitors PhonePe, Paytm, Google Pay, etc, will operate on the UPI platform. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) created and runs the UPI platform. It also approves Payment Service Providers (PSPs) who use its platform.

From Keeping India’s payments market competitive – The Financial Express:

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In the detection of Cybersecurity threats, we often need to understand what is normal, and what is not normal.

From Cybersecurity and Machine Learning: Predicting Numeric Outliers:

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Before converting to a cashless model, retailers should consult with an attorney to confirm that local and state laws do not ban discrimination against cash payments.

From Cities Prohibit Businesses Banning Cash During COVID-19:

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Kevin Pietersen (@KP24 on Twitter), who was a famous cricketer, has joined the ranks of those calling for “real names” on social media. On 9th June, he posted

Twitter needs to enforce these rules, in order to have an account:

1. Picture of your passport
2. Your mobile phone number
3. Your address
4. Copy of a utility bill with YOUR name on it.

For ALL of us!

This could save @Twitter!

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

As with other people who want something done

 

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at an Express Consignment Operations facility in Milwaukee on May 27. CBP seized 3,515 100-dollar bills for a total of $351,500.

The shipment arrived from Shanghai, China and was headed for a residence in Milwaukee.

From CBP Seizes $351K of Counterfeit Currency in Milwaukee | U.S. Customs and Border Protection:

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