Snippings

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But while “open banking” has found success in various corners of finance — such as by enabling faster lending decisions and new budgeting tools — it has so far failed to deliver the promise of powering a payments revolution.

From: Why Britain’s fintech dream is faltering.

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Taking advantage of this system requires diligence and restraint to avoid paying more in interest and fees than you gain in rewards.

From: Credit Card Rewards and Points Like AmEx Give Gen Z Luxury Lifestyle – Business Insider.

Now, I don’t have sufficient diligence or restraint to ensure that I get more in rewards than I pay out in frees. But a bot does. So what happens to these schemes when they are being used by bots, not people?

That Business Insider article also quotes a chap who says that every year he goes through his list of cards to see which ones paid for themselves and which ones did not, then he cancels the ones that do not wash their face. I don’t have time for that and even if I did I’d prefer to spend it playing Dungeons & Dragons. Bots, however, could do this day in and day out.

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👉 GenAI and Agents are the end of banking as we know it:

🔹 AI-led financial decision-making is shifting control from banks to digital platforms that act as financial gatekeepers. GenAI is a hyper-accelerant in this evolution—enabling more autonomous, seamless, and personalized experiences that pull activity away from traditional banking channels. Agentic AI will amplify these changes, making it even harder for banks to own the customer relationship.

🔹 AI-powered agents will optimize financial decisions in real time, making it easier for customers to switch providers and find better deals. Banks that once relied on stickiness will need new ways to earn loyalty.

🔹 AI-driven transparency will expose rate structures, fees, and lending terms in real time, eroding pricing power based on opacity. Banks will increasingly need to compete on financial value—offering transparent pricing—as well as intangible value: the timeliness and quality of their advice and how well they understand and anticipate customer needs.

From: For Banks The AI Reckoning Is Now.

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A 28-year-old Italian tourist was lured to a house in New York under false pretenses before a former business associate allegedly tried to extort millions from his crypto account. He was chained up, electrocuted, pistol-whipped and threatened with a chainsaw in order to get him to hand over his passwords.

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Social media should have a legal duty not to provide ad space to fraudsters in the first place. They ought to be expected to “know their customers” and be held liable, with proper enforcement and tough penalties, if they fail to block dissemination of fraudulent ads.

From: How to block the financial scammers on social media.

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Though mechanisms are improving for reimbursing victims, generally by the banking sector, the harm done by such frauds is huge. It includes not just the immediate losses and stress to victims and their banks, but also the erosion of trust in respectable sources of information and the financial industry.

From: How to block the financial scammers on social media.

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The victim was lured to the house under false pretenses before Woeltz – who was his former business associate – allegedly tried to extort millions from his crypto account.

The accused is said to have chained him up, electrocuted him, pistol-whipped him and threatened to cut him up with a chainsaw if he did not hand over his passwords.

From: Mystery brunette, 24, is tied to sadistic ‘crypto bros’ torture chamber at stunning $75k-a-month NYC mansion | Daily Mail Online.

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Last year, Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey published a paper titled Homebound which charted an “astounding change” in the time spent at home for every subset of the population and across virtually all daily activities. In the past two decades, time spent at home has risen among American adults by more than 690 minutes in a typical week. In the UK, the average time spent inside our homes daily is 18 hours and 43 minutes. Technology is shifting us away from the communal activities we once enjoyed outside our homes, leading us to an increasingly insular, home-based experience.

From: Trust fall – The RSA.

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I note that the Collisons (the genius brothers behind Stripe) were also quoted arguing that the lack of effective payments mechanism is the reason that the web went from being an open environment and opportunity for all to an “oligopoly controlled by five companies now worth more than $3 trillion”.

From: Micropayments Are A Macro Opportunity.

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Ben Thompson has written a brilliant piece about this. He notes that micropayments were not viable at the dawn of the web (or since) partly because of the fee problem of the dominant retail payment system (ie, cards) but mainly, as I have previously highlighted,  because micro-transactions are (as Ben phrases it) anti-human: “forcing a potential content consumer to continually decide on whether or not to pay for a piece of content is alienating, particularly when plenty of alternatives for their scarce attention exist”.

 

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websites would be able to communicate to agents what they wanted to make available and on what terms, along with some vague hand-waving about new advertising models and transactions. The last point is valid: Trip Advisor sells hotel rooms, and O’Reilly sells training courses, and you can see a world where websites based on transactions can not only benefit from exposing themselves to agents, but in fact transact more (and potentially pay an affiliate fee).

From: The Agentic Web and Original Sin – Stratechery by Ben Thompson.

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I’ve co-written a paper on this with Debbie Gamble, chief strategy officer at Interac, in which we identify the potential for a new payments infrastructure to both re-energise past propositions (e.g., micropayments) and create entirely new ones (supply-chain currencies). New transactions and new trade mean new prosperity so with the right governance in place, the payments industry can explore this entirely new frontier to the great benefit of the economy as a whole.

The paper is called Agentic commerce and payments: Exploring the implications of robots paying robots and it has just been published in the Journal of Payment Strategy & Systems 19(1), p.72-84 (Spring 2025) and you’d be mad not to subscribe to this August journal of record and read it now.

From: (9) The New Frontier for Payments – by David G.W. Birch.

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Over 40 Members of the British Parliament have signed a letter calling for the introduction of digital IDs in order to fight illegal migration, streamline public services and boost the economy. It is interesting, in the context of the current political climate in our United Kingdom, to see how the issue of illegal migration has become the first item on the agenda when it comes to discussing some form of digtial identity infrastructure. The Honourable Members say that a digital ID program could fight illegal immigration by tackling off-the-books employment which has been drawing migrants into the country, the MPs argue, and with some justification, given that the Mayors of Calais have been arguing for a decade that the UK should introduce identity cards as part of efforts to deter migrants gathering at the French port and attempting to cross the channel.

Right now, since we lack an identiy infrastructure, illegal immigrants simply buy fake documents. There are firms offering a full set of fraudulent documents for £5,000 or so. The illegal immigrants can then use the fake documents to make bogus applications to remain, or secure a job illegally. Thi sis not that difficult since most employers are not MI5-trained anti-counterfeit document detecting geniuses. Just to pick one random example from the newspapers here, an illegal immigrant from Algeria worked in a school for 20 years under a false name after using a bent Italian passport to pass the necessary checks.

(Now, you might well argue that in a country with heading towards nine million “economically inactive” people that if someone has been working, paying their taxes and staying out of trouble for 20 years than you should give them citizenship, but that’s a different issue.)