Snippings

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“Sheth, a personal banking manager at Barclays, was instrumental in opening many of the ‘mule’ accounts, using false ID and address documents.”

From “UK: Barclays boss who hid cash under sink jailed”.

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I just remembered something! Exactly one month ago I went to Amsterdam for Money2020 Europe. I think. Maybe I am remembering this wrong. It was hot and sunny when I got there, so I had an ice cream. I thought I’d try out something new but I wasn’t really paying attention so just chose some random flavour and in I went.

 

I got a bit confused and thought I was walking into a closet but actually it was a door into a another world. I can’t really remember much after that, possibly because of the hot sun on my head. Claire wanted to go to the a night club to meet a friend of hers called C.C. Group and told me to come Next Door so I did. I asked for Mr. Group but no-one answered and Tim said something about open banking so I told everyone there that it was asymmetric.

I must have fallen asleep after that because the next thing I remember is this weird dream about running away to join the circus. When I got to the Big Top I saw a lady on a trapeze and some men making white chocolate ice cream and you could have anything you wanted smashed up into the ice cream so long as you wanted raspberries or Oreos so I chose Oreos.

 

I thought you weren’t allowed to have animals at the circus any more but while I was looking for my friends, I came across two lovely doggies who showed me the way around.

There were clowns too, one of them dressed as Chris Skinner, and he told me that I had to be green in a room and to go on stage. I didn’t know what to do I went out and told them “roll up, roll up, for the greatest show on Earth” because I didn’t know any other circus things to say.

 

In my dream, I was talking to a man from Google about going from a wallet play to a more encompassing platform play. Then I was waiting for the jugglers to come on but instead El Mariachi came and told me that identity theft was a very bad thing and that biometrics can help to fix it.

 

I told him to get out of town but I knew he was right of course. Then I went on a boat on the canal. The canal was quiet and peaceful and much better than the street because in the street they were playing loud music and we were all dancing.

This is my friend Barry Blockhead. He told me that music should be distributed on a blockchain to ensure that artists get paid their royalities and that the moon is made of green cheese. I’d always suspected that cheese thing, so I think he’s on to something, but that music thing sounds far-fetched to me.

I came across a Dutchman in a purple suit who told me that the Queen was coming but I didn’t believe him until he bowed down for her.

The Queen told me that if I was good boy then I could have all of the curly-wurlies in the world to eat and I thought she was making it up but it turned out to be true so now I must do as she says.

Everyone was talking about identity and how it needed to be fixed and open banking and how it needed to be fixed and AI and how it needed to be fixed. I need to clear my head so I took a curly wurly and went to get a nice cup of coffee.

 

I was tired and I needed a bit of a pick-me-up but Sam said that I wasn’t allowed to stay for another coffee and made me come to the Italian red wine shop that served pasta on the side.

It’s all a bit hazy after that, to be honest, and when I woke up I was listening to Steve Wozniak, who invented Apple computers, said that robots could be ethical and that they might not turn into Terminators and kill us all but I think he was probably just being Californian and optimistic.

The next day, I met the Bulls and the Bears who were Clara Durodie from Cognitive Finance, Terry Cordeiro from Lloyds Banking, Emma Stromfelt from Swedbank and Prof. Markos Zachariadis from Warwick Business School. Emma is the Princess of AI, and we all bow down to her.

When I got up from bowing I was in Room 101 but instead of Frank Skinner there was that Dutchman in a purple suit again. So it’s possible I was still asleep and dreaming. I get mixed up sometimes.

The Dutchman in a purple suit asked me what I wanted to put in Room 101 so I told him the blockchain and everyone cheered and he gave me a crown.

 

After I got the crown, I figured that now I was the king and decided to leave behind the Queen and the curly wurlies and I tried quite a few different doors until I managed to get out. But I did, and now I feel brave enough to tell you all what went on in the big tent. I thought I was on drugs, but it turns out that all of this actually happened. See you in Amsterdam for Money 2020 next year.

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“Visa says the widespread outage which affected customers in the UK, Europe and abroad was caused by a ‘hardware failure’ and was not the result of unauthorised access.”

From “Visa outage: payment chaos after card network crashes – as it happened | Business | The Guardian”.

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I was caught up in the great Visa disaster of 2018 just the same as everybody else was. I walked into a store bought something and tapped my iPhone on the terminal and was completely shocked to see a message along the lines of “declined”. At the time I just assumed usual levels of incompetency at either the acquirer or the issuer and reached into my bag for another card. This happened to be a MasterCard and it worked perfectly.

 It was only a little while later that the Twitter sphere alerted me to the nature and extent of the calamity. The Visa network was, according to frontline reports, down. I checked with some colleagues who have all of the necessary test jiggery-pokery and they told me that the network wasn’t there at all was not down and that authorisation messages were reaching the issuers. After that, no one knew what was going on and no authorisation responses were making it back through the network to the terminals. Thus, the terminals didn’t get an authorisation and declined the card but the charge was registered by the issuer. The issue was didn’t know anything was wrong because they were sending back appropriate authorisation responses.

 

Sure enough, I looked at my phone and my Visa credit card was indeed showing the charge that had been declined. I assumed this point that there would be complete chaos (I was right) and then it would take enormous amounts of hassle to unwind. You can see why: my issuer thinks that the merchant got the positive response and has debited my account, but when the settlement records don’t match those charges will have to be refunded

 

 

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“The core of the issue is identification and trust, not the payment instrument.”

From “Some observations on Japan | Consult Hyperion”.

 

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If I had been in charge at the Waitrose round the corner, I would have told the staff to ring up the transactions as cash, put a post it note in the till with with card number, expiry date and amount and then paid the staff overtime for manual keying after the store closed. Then I’d knock the cost of the overtime (and any transactions declined after manual entry) off of the bill from my acquirer and tell them to get the money back from Visa. That way there would a very slight delay for customers on check out but no real disruption and no abandoned shopping trolleys all over the place.

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In the email, the hackers also explain how they acquired the data, using an algorithm to get account numbers, which allowed them to pose as authentic account holders who had forgotten their password. This enabled them to reset the backup security questions and answers and gain access to the account.

From BMO and Simplii hackers demand ransom of $1m in XRP.

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Much of the banking industry has approached digital identity as a security and liability concern to be managed. Capital One has taken a different tack, spending much of the past year building out a digital identity platform that it can potentially position as a service it would sell to businesses.

From How Capital One sees digital identity as a business opportunity | American Banker.

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Financial markets are characterised by asymmetric information that generates constraints, or frictions, on the possible set of outcomes for households and firms.

From The Financial Foundations of the Productivity Puzzle – Jagjit S. Chadha, Amit Kara, Paul Labonne, 2017.

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Balkanium, as the name suggests is the new cryptocurrency for the Balkan region that comprises of countries like Albania, Croatia, Romania, Serbia, some part of Turkey, Greece and more. This digital currency is created with an aim to bring fluidity of ethnic groups in the region and to create a network of shops and entrepreneurs who’ll use Balkanium as a payment method and offer a discount to the users.

From Balkanium, the new cryptocurrency aims to revolutionize payment systems and economy in the Balkan region – Press Release – Digital Journal.

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Switzerland has emerged as the global capital of banking secrecy in the latest Financial Secrecy Index (FSI), published this week.

Tax transparency and anti-corruption campaigners Tax Justice Newtwork, which compiled the list, found that: “Switzerland has delayed the implementation of automatic information exchange, and in 2017 lawmakers attempted to stop it altogether with countries they deemed ‘corrupt’.”

“As the FSI demonstrates, countries like Switzerland are fundamental to the flow of illicit financial funds, such as the proceeds of corruption

From Switzerland named as capital of banking secrecy.

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The California bill, B.O.T. Act of 2018 (S.B. 1001), would make it unlawful for any person to use a social bot to communicate or interact with natural persons online without disclosing that the bot is not a natural person.

From Should AI Always Identify Itself? It’s more complicated than you might think. | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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Today Thursday 26th August, the chink of change was replaced by the tap of a card as passers-by used contactless technology to give money to the UK’s first ever cashless busker.

From First Busker In The UK To Say ‘No’ To Cash | Home.Barclaycard.

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