Snippings

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In 2015, the call-blocking app YouMail estimated that close to a billion robo-calls were being placed every month. Two years later, that number has leapt to 2.5 billion. At best, these calls annoy. At worst, they defraud. By far, they constitute the top consumer complaint received by the FTC.

[From

How robo-call moguls outwitted the government and completely wrecked the Do Not Call list

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In the past, it has taken generations for humans to develop political, cultural, and institutional antibodies to the novelty and upheaval of previous information revolutions.

[From

It’s the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech | WIRED

]

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As the UK enters the new era of Open Banking, we are all familiar with the opportunities for new financial services providers to use the new infrastructure to provide new products and services. As Ken Wattana pointed out, open banking depends on having identity services as part of that infrastructure. Third parties using the bank APIs to obtain customer data and to instruct payments on their behalf must have confidence in that infrastructure, just as customers must. One way to do this is to use standard, tried and tested approaches and have good reference implementations for thorough testing. In the UK, for example, the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE, the body funded by the banks to deliver open banking) chose ForgeRock to build the reference banking application that will be used by the banks and the third parties to build and test their applications.

It’s important to note, though, that the opportunities for third parties extend way beyond financial services. To pick just one example, open banking is going to have an impact in the retail sector. Why? Well, retailers can use the customer account data and account-to-account “instant payments” to make their businesses more efficient and more effective. A recent Consult Hyperion survey found that more than 90% of merchants want to use PSD2 to reduce card fees and also that three-quarters of them want to use it to reduce the impact of fraud and data breaches. An Accenture survey last year also found that half of the retailers they surveyed want to use customers’ bank account data to provide special offers and customised services at POS.

In the week in which the Amazon Go store went live, it is easy to imagine how open banking could transform the retail experience. I’d be very happy to go self-scanning around the supermarket, hanging up the scanner at the end and seeing the retailer’s app pop up on my phone with the total, prompting me to use a PIN, or fingerprint, or my face to confirm: at which point the retailer instructs and instant instant payment from my account to their account! As a customer, the instant payment proposition seems just as familiar as a debit proposition: the customer walks out of the retailer and the money walks out of the customers account. (The fact that it never goes near the existing rails isn’t something a customer knows nor cares about.)

The retailers themselves, especially the millions of small retailers, will also benefit from this transition because a variety of new products and services will spring up to help them to manage their bank accounts, funding requirements and general financial services needs. I’m no expert on small business financing but the ability to see the details of a retailer’s bank account will surely lead to new opportunities for specialist financial services providers.  

This is also a great opportunity for new players (eg, Google, Apple, Facebook and so on) to join the ecosystem. While the existing rails may be bypassed, open banking also provides an opportunity for the schemes to reinvent themselves and their propositions. Not only is the UK is about to become an interesting, exciting and unpredictable open banking laboratory, but Mastercard’s purchase of VocaLink will be an experiment in the reinvention and extension of they proposition.  A payment scheme isn’t just a data switch that connects consumers, banks, merchants and retailers (if it was, there wouldn’t be any because we’d use the internet instead). Rates, rules and rights are fields in which Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover et al have decades of experience to leverage through both their existing relationships and the new ones that will arise. Helping retailers to recognise customers, manage their relationships with them and provide reputations that are useful to others (the “3Rs” approach to identity in commerce) will be a key role for the financial service players, the internet giants and other new players. It goes without saying that I expect ForgeRock to support all of them in this process.

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A Starbucks shop in Seattle, Washington has gone completely cashless in its transactions as part of the global coffee chain’s test to scrap bills and coins in the long run.

From Starbucks store goes completely cashless: Will more branches follow suit?

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A newly-opened café in Singapore has been the centre of attention for being the first restaurant in the city-state to go completely zero cash. Aside from credit cards and Nets, the café highlights its additional payment method—virtual currencies like bitcoin.

From Singapore’s first cashless café allows you to pay in bitcoin

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I once went out to lunch with an old schoolfriend of mine (we went to University together as well) who ended up in a very senior position in finance in a telecommunications company. Toward the end of a pleasant meal, some sort of alarm went off on his phone. He glanced at the device and then jumped up and ran out, shouting over his shoulder as he went words to the effect of “damn and blast, I’d quite forgotten that I had to buy £25 million in euros before 2pm, I must return to the office post haste”. Well, that sort of interruption of the port and cheese is no more.

The biggest trade on the bank’s mobile FX trading app exceeded $400 million, and it’s not uncommon to see $100 million deals go through the app, whose biggest users are hedge funds and other financial institutions.

From FX Traders Do $100 Million Deals on Mobile Phones – Bloomberg

So people are instructing transfers of hundreds of millions of dollar using their phones and, presumably, their faces or fingerprints, or at least a PIN if the transaction is for more than ten million dollars.

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“the ban does not include fees that are not linked to the payment method”

From “Ban on shops charging to use cards is now in force – this is what it means – Plymouth Herald”.

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Born in Canada in 1911, McLuhan studied at the University of Manitoba and University of Cambridge before becoming a lecturer at the University of Toronto. He rose to prominence in the 1960s for his work as a media theorist and for coining the term “global village”, which was a prescient vision of the internet age.

From Who was Marshall McLuhan and how did he predict the internet?

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“In the new electric world, where everybody is involved with everybody, where everybody is involved in complex processes, the old identity cards, the old means of finding out who am I, will not work. (1968)

From Marshall McLuhan: Prophet of the Internet Age | McLuhan Galaxy

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“MALONE: What Levin is saying is that bitcoin private keys are designed to be un-guessable even by the most powerful computers we have right now. But if Turner happened to write down part of this key at some point, there are companies that will use that information to help him break into his account…

LEVIN: For the people that have lost their bitcoins, I say tough luck. (Laughter).”

From “Finding Your Lost Bitcoins : NPR”.

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Latin lesson at Winchester College.

An Accenture report on the topic from 2017 notes (accurately, in my opinion) that “trusted social media companies (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and tech companies (Google, Apple) will capture a significant slice of the [AISP/PISP] market”.