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Virgin Money has suspended thousands of customers’ credit cards without warning, at a time when many households are on a financial cliff edge.

The Guardian understands that as many as 32,000 customers were told by email on Tuesday that their accounts were blocked with immediate effect, and that they would not be able to make further purchases.

The move, which the Newcastle-based bank said was part of routine “affordability checks carried out by a responsible lender”

From Virgin Money suspends thousands of credit cards with no warning | Credit cards | The Guardian:

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Founded in Hong Kong, SenseTime is an artificial intelligence company that focuses on innovative computer vision and deep learning technologies, while the institute dedicated to the research of digital currency and fintech development.

SenseTime will also strengthen cooperation in application development of AI technologies in the financial scenarios to help financial institutions improve risk control capability and boost business operation.

From SenseTime, central bank partner to promote AI technology in finance – China.org.cn:

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With SafeEntryBC, instead of writing down your name, company and date of visit, you are sent a real-time request for a set of (digital) credentials that you must present that are suitable for mitigating the risk of you entering the facility. In some places, that might be just your name and the company for whom you work. In high risk locations, such a request might include asking for a credential about your COVID-19 status—perhaps a recent “negative” test or (if/when such a thing becomes available) an immunity credential.

From SafeEntryBC Overview – Verifiable Organizations Network:

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Using a smartphone app to compromise 1\% of the population, an attacker could monitor the location of more than half of London’s population.

From [1803.09007] Quantifying Surveillance in the Networked Age: Node-based Intrusions and Group Privacy:

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The second point is that TIPS is basically a central bank-owned version of XRP, which makes the Ripple offering irrelevant and is maybe a reason why the much-anticipated xRapid product saw little uptake from the large financial institutions.
Some of the TIPS features include:
secure an end-to-end processing time of 10 seconds or less
support the expected large volumes of transactions and meet scalability requirements
secure availability around the clock without maintenance windows
enable a deployment process with no interruption in the service.
Further to this, “there are no entry or account maintenance fees. The price per instant payment transaction is fixed at 0.20 eurocent (€0.002) until at least November 2020,” and the “first 10 million payments made by each TIPS participant before the end of 2019 are free of charge.”

From The European Central Bank are Pushing Digital Payments:

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Terms of service specify each company’s Exposure Notification APIs may only be used by developers working for, or on behalf of, a government health authority and must be applied exclusively to Covid-19 response efforts rather than other purposes, for example policing or quarantine enforcement.

Apps cannot request data revealing the device’s precise location, instead using anonymous Bluetooth identifiers to determine potential exposure to an infected individual, which are discarded after 30 days.

And the apps must be voluntary: people testing positive must give approval for the information to be shared. Developers must also minimise collection of personal data collection, blocking the sale, licensing or use for advertising.

Only one app using the API is permitted per country, unless otherwise approved.

From Apple, Google impose strict Covid-19 app data rules – Mobile World Live:

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The argument for paying their workers in scrip was that the secluded location of mining communities made it difficult to provide cash to the miners; however, a 1911 report by the Immigration Commission found that in some cases, miners were receiving only 30% of their wages in cash.

According to Lou Athey, the Charles A. Dana professor emeritus of history at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania, “Coal companies received significant advantages in using scrip. Scrip reduced the outflow of capital, strengthened company cash flow, and reduced payroll theft, thereby lowering the cost of security… Miners often received pay envelopes marked with a curling line across them, a symbol miners called the ‘bobtail check’ or the ‘snake.’ It meant no wages due.”

Though coal companies refused to exchange scrip with legal tender, some miners found other locals willing to purchase coal scrip for a fraction of its value.

To combat this, a 1925 West Virginia law, driven by coal lobbyist, made it unlawful for scrip to be transferred to a third party. This law further solidified the company’s power over employees, effectively holding them hostage from escaping to other jobs or regions of the nation.

From Coal Mining: The History of Scrip | Appalachian Magazine:

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Measures passed by the British Parliament in the 19th century regarding the method of payment of wages. Certain employers paid their workmen in goods or in tokens, which could be exchanged only at shops owned by the employers – the so‐called truck system. The Truck Act of 1831 listed many trades in which payment of wages must be made in coins. It was amended by an Act of 1887, which extended its provisions to cover virtually all manual workers.

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Revolut’s hunt for acquisitions is part of a wider effort to continue expanding despite the damage caused by the coronavirus. On Monday, it announced that it had finally started operating as a full bank in Lithuania, where it secured its first banking licence in late 2018.

The change will allow its 300,000 Lithuanian customers to upgrade from e-money accounts to full bank accounts, meaning their money will be covered by the country’s deposit guarantee scheme. The company said it would introduce consumer loans and expand the service into the rest of central and eastern Europe later this year.

From Revolut on the hunt for acquisitions | Financial Times:

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n 2015, Mr. Wisser applied for the card at a non-U.S. bank. An AmEx compliance screening system initially declined the bank’s application request, but additional approval attempts caused the system to time out and the application was automatically approved, OFAC said.

Still, the application was flagged for review, but the AmEx compliance analyst who handled it determined incorrectly that Mr. Wisser wasn’t a sanctioned individual, the agency said.

In determining its enforcement action, the Treasury concluded that there was no willful or reckless behavior on AmEx’s part, that the company had cooperated with OFAC’s investigation and that it had taken steps to prevent any further violations.

From AmEx Mistakenly Issued Card to German With Ties to Nuclear-Weapons Black Market, Treasury Says – WSJ:

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The Smart Payment Association have proposed using the SEPA Credit Transfer (SCT) infrastructure to bypass the existing card scheme infrastructure. The idea is to replace “pull” payments (via acquirers, networks, switches, authorisation servers and so on) over the existing networks with a “push” payment (from the customer’s account to the merchant’s account). They say that under their proposed system “the terminal would connect on-line to a dedicated platform operated by a service provider [which] identifies the bank that issued the card and sends, through Open APIs, a payment initiation request”. This would be processed by the bank, and a confirmation sent to the PISP and then the customer.