Snippings

A couple of years ago, John Cryan (then CEO of Deutsche Bank) said that that the bank was going to shift from employing people to act like robots to employing robots to act like people. Now they have announced 

Deutsche Bank has announced swingeing job cuts as part of a radical overhaul of its operations that will also see it spend €13bn on new technology over the next four years.

From Deutsche Bank to spend €13bn on tech amid massive job cuts.

I told a journalist who asked me about this that for Deutsche Bank to achieve real transformation, they cannot spend their way out of the legacy infrastructure trap. They must partner with the FinTech players who are redefining products and services for an online age, which means “Amazonisation” (ie, a shift to API-centric production and consumption of financial services).

(At the same time, I was board advisor to a financial services company that was going through this amazonisation process and I could see the benefits, so I wasn’t really guessing, I’d seen at first hand how the reduced costs and increased flexibility paid off.)

Deutsche have made considerable investments in technology and, indeed, these improvements in infrastructure “are already making some humans at Deutsche unnecessary“.

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Wang Xin, director of the People’s Bank of China research bureau, warns the new digital currency could have major impact on monetary policy and financial stability

From Facebook’s Libra forcing China to step up plans for its own cryptocurrency, says central bank official | South China Morning Post.

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Facebook said that they assumed the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) or the CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) would regulate Libra.

From Inside the Congressional Staff Meeting About Libra.

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In the absence of any detail on what might comprise a decentralized identity standard from Libra’s perspective, some dots can be joined by examining the recent work of George Danezis and his co-founders at Chainspace, a startup acquired by Facebook in May.

A paper introducing a “selective disclosure credential scheme” called Coconut explains how a system of smart contracts (computer programs that run on top of blockchains) could “issue user credentials depending on the state of the blockchain, or attest some claim about a user operating through the contract – such as their identity, attributes, or even the balance of their wallet.”

The Coconut protocol goes on to describe how credentials can be jointly issued in a decentralized manner by a group of “mutually distrusting authorities.” These credentials cannot be forged by users or a group of corrupt authorities, and are also “re-randomized” prior to being presented for verification to further protect user privacy. Unlike some computationally-hungry proving schemes, this is done in a matter of a few milliseconds making it highly scalable.

From Buried in Facebook’s Libra White Paper, a Digital Identity Bombshell – CoinDesk.

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“‘In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company,’ said Mr. Zuckerberg.”

From “Opinion | Launching a Global Currency Is a Bold, Bad Move for Facebook – The New York Times”.

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“Identity fraud significantly increased in 2018, with 189,108 cases recorded an 8% increase on 2017’s figures. Plastic cards were hit the hardest with 82,608 reports of fraud, up 41% from 2017. More fraud means more victims – 19 out of 20 frauds involved a victim left to pick up the pieces. .”

From “New annual figures show UK fraud continues to rise”.

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“Delegated Account Recovery lets people use their Facebook account to recover access to your service if they forget their password.”

From “Delegated Account Recovery”.

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In practice, “coordinated inauthentic behavior” has become a sort of catchall label for untoward meddling on Facebook, snagging everyone from Burmese military officers to Russian meme spammers.

From Project Veritas Admits It’s Violating Facebook Policies.

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One of the things we are learning about digital technology is that in almost every area of its deployment it has become an amplifier of inequality.

From The robots are definitely coming and will make the world a more unequal place | John Naughton | Opinion | The Guardian.

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Global central banks may have to issue their own digital currencies sooner than expected, the general manager of the Bank for International Settlements has said, after Facebook recently unveiled plans to create its own stablecoin.

Agustín Carstens, who heads the BIS, known as the central bankers’ bank, told the Financial Times that the organisation supported the efforts of the world’s central banks in creating digital versions of state currencies.

From Central bank plans to create digital currencies receive backing | Financial Times.

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