Snippings

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Banks have a clear opportunity to reclaim their position in merchant servicing by leveraging five strategic building blocks:

Refocus with clarity and move nimbly.

Choose the right business models to compete effectively.

Build digital capabilities that support and secure business strategy.

Capitalize on the marketplace edge in trust, data, and liquidity.

Scale through best-in-class delivery of verticalized, value-added services.

From: CapGemini World Payments Report 2026

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It is interesting to think about the extent to which dynamics around cash with extend to the digtal euro (depending on the design, of course) because while a digital euro may act as substitute for cash in supermarket transactions it may not for “cash-in-hand” casual labour (where cryptocurrency may substitute in the future).

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Why cash alone won’t cut it: Practical strategies to increase resilience in European payment infrastructure

From: Why cash alone won’t cut it: Practical strategies to increa…: Ingenta Connect.

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The McKinsey report states that $23tn of the $70tn in the consumer banking sector are held in zero interest accounts. Unless banks adapt their offerings, this could amount to a loss of 9% to the bottom line, which would push average returns for banks below the cost of capital.

And while the use of AI should lead to initial savings of between 15% and 20% of operating costs. These benefits will erode over time due to competition.

From: Bank profits face $170bn hit from AI – McKinsey.

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I firmly believe that the future of payments will be built on infrastructure where stablecoins operate as part of the settlement layer.

From: Could Stablecoins Redesign The Future Of Payments?.

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Oh wow. It looks as if the Fed read my Forbes column. Just a couple of weeks ago and I wrote about national trust bank charters, noting that these does not mean a Federal Reserve Master Account and direct access to the payment system pointing out that lobbying around this has already started (with Ripple, for one example, applying for a Fed Master Account via its New York trust licence) and observing that such access would be good for competition and innovation.

Only three days later, I see that at the Fed’s first Payments Innovation Conference, Governor Waller began talking about Fed Payment Account (a “skinny” account) that would provide access to the Fed payment rails but, unlike a Master Account, would not pay interest on balances or provide other banking services. This would indeed benefit challengers and I think that is should be brought in as soon as possible.

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The Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack may have been ‘the single most financially damaging’ incident of its kind to ever hit Britain, new research suggests.

The JLR cyberattack started in late August and prompted an IT shutdown and a halt in global manufacturing operations, including at the firm’s major British plants at Solihull, Halewood, and Wolverhampton.

Dealer systems were intermittently unavailable, and suppliers faced cancelled or delayed orders, with uncertainty about future supply.

The Cyber Monitoring Centre estimates the financial impact of the JLR cyberattack reached £1.9billion and affected over 5,000 organisations.

From: Jaguar Land Rover hack cost UK economy £1.9bn, report claims | This is Money.

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hen DynamoDB went down, so did the services built on top of it. That included streaming apps, online games, and even smart devices like Alexa speakers and Ring doorbells.

And because AWS’s Northern Virginia region also handles core management tasks for the platform, the failure spread quickly. Even companies hosting data in other AWS regions still depend on us-east-1 for certain background operations. So, when it hiccups, everyone feels it.

From: How the AWS outage happened — and why it’s breaking the internet | Tom’s Guide.

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A core tension exists between the two objectives of the BSA of making crime more difficult and making criminals easier to detect, capture, and convict. The first pushes criminals out of the formalized banking system by discouraging financial institutions from providing services. The second relies on the provision of financial services by institutions subject to these laws to provide the data necessary for law enforcement to use these tools (Gifford, Barr, and Klein 2018). This tension helps explain why current American law largely allows banks to provide financial services to those suspected of engaging in criminal activity but requires them to report that activity.

From: Payment systems’ changing role from economic growth to the new foreign policy lever | Brookings.

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Chinese tech giants have paused plans to issue stablecoins in Hong Kong, after Beijing raised concerns about the rise of currencies controlled by the private sector.

Companies including Alibaba-backed Ant Group and ecommerce group JD.com had said over the summer they would participate in Hong Kong’s pilot stablecoin programme or issue virtual asset-backed products, such as tokenised bonds.

But they have since put their stablecoin ambitions on hold after receiving instructions from Chinese regulators, including the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) and Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), not to move ahead, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.

From: Chinese tech giants pause stablecoin plans after Beijing steps in.

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