A library of snippets
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President Maduro said there were “entire warehouses full of 100-bolivar notes in the [Colombian cities of] Cucuta, Cartagena, Maicao and Buaramanga”.
From Venezuela pulls highest-value banknote ‘to strike against mafia’ – BBC News
I was quite surprised to read this, given that the 100-bolivar note is worth about 10p, but whatever.
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if blockchains (in the sense of useful peer-to-peer databases) are ever going to emerge as a coherent product category, it’s important to distinguish between half-baked and real solutions
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Perry Kramer, vice president and practice lead at consultant Boston Retail Partners, contends that as many as 80 percent of retailers today are already largely cashless
“Retailers don’t really want to be banks. It’s not their sweet spot,” he says. “It is much less expensive to process credit and debit than it is cash, because cash has a lot of labor involved.”
From Cashing In or Cashing Out? | National Retail Federation
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Banks have said that providing such accounts to the financially vulnerable is a loss-making business for them
From Lloyds fails on fee-free in no-frills bank accounts market | Reuters
They are. Of course. What almost all of these finally vulnerable people need is a payment account, not a bank account. A simple, pre-paid account with a decent app able to nudge them to help them. And it needs to have a low regulatory overhead so that it works for all of the stakeholders.
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The surge in use, however, comes as the Treasury cautioned that the entrenched use of mobile money in the country posed fiscal risks to the economy if the service collapses.
From Mobile Money Africa
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Cybercriminals can already read information from the card chip Artyom Sychev, Deputy Director, General Directorate of Security and Information Protection, Bank of Russia
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With the blockchain, you gain access to two things. On one hand, you could select only the pertinent information required for that transaction-and entering a bar through a bouncer is a transaction. In this case: name, picture, and age. On the other hand, the bouncer can rest easy knowing that once something is hashed into the blockchain, it can’t be changed; new information can only be appended and there is a transparent record of all changes.
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Starbucks has announced its new MyBarista service that will allow people to order (and pay, of course) using chat and voice interfaces.
Starbucks Mobile App customers will be able to place their orders via voice command or messaging interface,
From Starbucks Unveils Five-Year Growth Plan, Introduces Voice Payment Feature | Bank Innovation
I noticed an e-mail from Business Intelligence that says
Mobile Peer-to-Peer payments in the U.S. are forecast to grow from $5.6 billion in 2014 to nearly $175 billion by 2019 as consumers increasingly skip the hassle of writing a check or going to an ATM. But smartphone vendors like Apple could cripple the dominant player of 2016 (Venmo) if they make a serious push to own the space.
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Snippings