A library of snippets
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Spain has launched a mobile version of its National Identity Document (DNI), allowing citizens to carry official ID on their smartphones via a new government app. Approved by the Council of Ministers, the initiative is part of Spain’s broader push to digitise public services.
The digital DNI will be available through the MiDNI app,
From: Digital Identity: Global Roundup | THINK Digital Partners : THINK Digital Partners.
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British supermarket chain Asda kicked off a live facial recognition trial in five of its stores in an attempt to increase security amid a rise in retail crime. The facial recognition system is supplied by UK-based startup FaiceTech. The Manchester-headquartered company claims that its edge-based live facial recognition system FaiceAlert has a 99.992 percent matching accuracy when matching faces 1:N.
From: Digital Identity: Global Roundup | THINK Digital Partners : THINK Digital Partners.
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Researchers from the UK’s National Health Service have identified a possible unexpected benefit of the rise in contactless payments: fewer children are turning up at hospitals after swallowing coins.
From: Coin-cidence? Is cashless society leading to few kids eating coins?.
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Earlier this year, employees at online diaper seller Coterie noticed customers arriving from an intriguing new source—ChatGPT.
Coterie, like most brands, asks its customers how they heard about the company after they make a purchase. The typical answer is word of mouth. But in recent months, some shoppers started crediting their purchase to OpenAI’s popular artificial intelligence chatbot, which added real-time search features last fall, making it a more important source of inspiration for shoppers—and of business for retailers.
From: AI Search Is New Arms Race for Retailers — The Information.
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With the arrival of AI agents, businesses are looking at growing future opportunities. One of them is granting access to AI agents to our verifiable credentials (VCs) to act on our behalf
From: AI agents and verifiable credentials: A match made in heaven? | Biometric Update.
Actually, I think that’s not quite right. We don’t want AIs to present our verifiable credentials we want AIs to present their own verifiable credentials that we have consented to authorise. In other words, my bot shouldn’t show up at a bank pretending to me: it should show up at a bank as a bot acting on my behalf. Now, this makes digital identity for bots more complicated, but also more flexible. Jelena Hoffart of Mastercard and I have written a paper about this for the Journal of Digital Banking.
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Identity Verification: The MCP server validates the agent’s credential against a registry, ensuring it’s not a rogue actor. Think of this as a KYC for AI—only trusted agents get in.
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Frank Young summarises this quite well
We need to draw a clear distinction to delineate where MCP can add value and where existing capabilities work just fine. Why build MCP gateways when current APIs already shine for simple flows?
Stick with APIs: For scaled, simple flows (subscriptions, point-of-sale), lean on current infrastructure—don’t fix what isn’t broken.
Leverage MCP: For agentic commerce’s frontier (negotiation, fraud response, optimization), build MCP gateways and token flows to capture these complex, high-value scenarios.
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MCP as described by Anthropic is the open standard that allows AI models to connect to many different apps and data sources in a consistent way.
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So the fight for domination of the future payments system is on — and the US wants to win. The broader European public may be blissfully unaware. But those in charge of the Eurozone are also determined that this battle for technological control over the economy is one that the EU must not lose. This is the fundamental motivation for the digital euro — a central bank-issued official digital currency that, if done well and fast enough, will rival or outperform the attractiveness of dollar stablecoins.
From: The battle for the global payments system is under way.
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I hear from a relative in admin in a lettings agency that utility companies get 90% of landlord utility bills wrong, endlessly, and even with photographic evidence it can take 6 months to get a right bill – all wasted cost and time
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Snippings