Snippings

xxx

It’s no exaggeration to say that TfL’s technology has transformed the payments industry, and contactless is quickly becoming ubiquitous

From Digital Currencies And Credit Cards Have Subways To Thank For Their Existence.

xxx

xxx

The nightmare for the U.S. financial industry is that a technology company—whether from China or a homegrown juggernaut such as Amazon.com Inc. or Facebook Inc.—replicates the success of Alipay and WeChat in America. The stakes are enormous, potentially carving away billions of dollars in annual revenue from major banks and other firms.

From Why China’s Payment Apps Give U.S. Bankers Nightmares.

xxx

xxx

if a bank fails to perform a critical verification step, then you might have a problem

From Shimmers and Skimmers: Fraudsters Find Opportunity in EMV Chip Cards – PaymentsJournal.

Hello. What are they talking about? What is this “critical verification step” that banks might fail to perform (or, at least, banks not advised by Consult Hyperion might fail to perform)? To understand what they are talking about here, you have to understand that you cannot create a counterfeit chip card in the same way that you can create a counterfeit magnetic stripe card. The chips contain a private key that is never revealed, so if you capture all of the data that is on a card or exchanged with a terminal during the process of a transaction, you will obtain the card number and expiry date and so on (these things are not encrypted between the card and the terminal) but so what? You cannot make a fake chip stripe card with these details because you don’t have that pesky private key so you can’t add the correct digital signature to a transaction.

Now, you could of course just make a random signature and hope that the issuing bank doesn’t check it. But that would be ridiculous because surely all banks would check the digital signatures on all transactions, right? Wrong. As we wrote about here many years ago, some banks do not 

This was one of the elements of the EBA’s PSD2 Guidelines that the FCA highlighted.

ASPSPs must avoid imposing unnecessary requirements (such as additional consent checks) when designing and implementing their dedicated interfaces

From FCA statement on EBA’s draft PSD2 Guidelines and Opinion for banks and others involved in open banking | FCA.

xxx

xxx

Police believe the gang had been selling fake identification documents to help people gain work or services illegally, and open bank accounts to launder money.

From Inside fake passport factory ‘where counterfeit documents were made’ | Metro News.

xxx

xxx

Corda is a distributed ledger platform, not a traditional blockchain platform. It was never designed to be one.

From r3.com » Blog Archive » When is Blockchain not a Blockchain?.

xxx

xxx

Britain’s ATMs are disappearing at a rate of 300 per month across the UK

From Three hundred cash machines disappearing each month leaving villages at risk of ATM blackout.

xxx

xxx

The New Zealand survey, carried out in January by Auckland company Perceptive Research, shows cash may soon be a thing of the past. Only a miniscule seven per cent of Kiwis carry cash as the main form of payment, two-thirds don’t carry any at all, and 48 per cent believe it will be gone the way of the dinosaurs within a decade.

From When no change is change – NZ Herald.

xxx

xxx

Australia’s Open Banking use cases are limited in terms of functionality, as it allows only read access, which limits payments initiation/write-access functionality—unlike UK Open Banking and PSD2, where it is allowed. However, in terms of accounts in scope, Australia includes more accounts (such as lending accounts) while these are not included in UK and PSD2.

From Open Banking framework comes to Australia | Accenture Banking Blog.

xxx

xxx

Commercial bank seigniorage represents a structural element of subtraction of net real resources from the economy, with potentially deflationary effects on profits and/or wages, distributional consequences, and frictions between capital and labor – all effects that should be studied carefully.

From Monies (old and new) through the lenses of modern accounting | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal.

xxx