Snippings

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It is therefore time for the US to address three simple but hard questions: how to future-proof the dollar for a world of competing digital networks, how to maintain the dollar’s world reserve currency status and, perhaps most importantly, how to preserve the universal values for which the dollar has historically stood.

Designed properly, digital instruments based on the dollar and other democratic currencies should run on systems that are operationally transparent, providing independent assurance about technical function and security. They should also reflect democratic values of freedom from unwarranted surveillance, censorship and control by both governments and commercial firms.

From: Digital dollars must reflect American values.

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Dave Birch, published author and Top 100 Global Fintech Influencer, moderated speakers Jean-François Mazure, global head of cash clearing services, Societe Generale and Simon McConnell, managing director and global head of European clearing, Citi Services as they discussed levelling up payments products in banking.

From: EBAday 2025: How can banks achieve excellence in payments?.

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The lawyer denied using AI but admitted that she might have inadvertently done so while researching on the internet in preparation for her case.

From: UK judge sounds alarm on AI misuse in courts – POLITICO.

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The ECPA has released a white paper which shows that in 2024 there were over 263 million European Card Scheme (ECS) payment cards in circulation, which made 31.5 billion transactions last year alone.

However, the payments space is dominated by Visa and Mastercard, who between them process 65% of euro area card payments, while US tech giants such as Apple, Google and PayPal are also gaining popularity.

From: European Card Payment Association calls for EU payments sovereignty.

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Android, via Credential Manager’s DigitalCredential API, now natively supports OpenID4VP and OpenID4VCI for digital credential presentation and issuance respectively.

From: Android Developers Blog: Announcing Android support of digital credentials.

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The successful candidate will be the first female head of the service in more than a century since the SIS was founded. She will take up the role this autumn when the current head of the agency, Sir Richard Moore, steps down following a five-year term. Moore has been an advocate of greater diversity in the appointments process and has previously pledged that he would be the last “C” to be selected from an all-male shortlist.

From: UK close to appointing first female head of MI6.

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Nationwide believes that simply having the choice of coming into a branch is helping it win customers of all ages. Its famous promise to keep all of its sites open until 2028 at least means it is literally the “last bank in town” in 135 locations around the UK. Nearly 200,000 more customers have used its branches year-on-year, and 40 per cent of Isas are opened in person (these tend to carry much higher balances than Isas transferred online).

From: The bank branch might just have a very bright future.

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For an hour yesterday (June 5, 2025), we were treated to the spectacle of the US House Judiciary Committee, both Republicans and Democrats, listening – really listening, it seemed – to four experts defending strong encryption. The four: technical expert Susan Landau and lawyers Caroline Wilson-Palow, Richard Salgado, and Gregory Nejeim.

The occasion was a hearing on the operation of the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (2018), better known as the CLOUD Act.

The lawmakers reserved particular outrage for the UK’s audacity in demanding that Apple provide that backdoor access for *all* users worldwide. In other words, *Americans*.

From: Nephology – net.wars.

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The Genius Act, caught in this muddle, gives the benefits of federal financial regulation to a particular payments technology — distributed ledgers — that is, the blockchains that underlie stablecoins. “You don’t a need distributed ledger to [solve the problems with payments] but we are writing regulation for distributed ledger technology” only. What would a modern payment company that did not use a public blockchain look like? Like Stripe, but with access to the Fed’s payment rails:

From: Still more on stablecoins.

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A better regulatory regime would give payments companies access to the Fed’s payment rails without allowing them to take and invest deposits, rather than creating a new, narrower, less-regulated form of deposit-taker — based on only one of many possible technologies — just for the sake of facilitating payments.

From: Still more on stablecoins.

This is an argument for a US equivalent to the European Payment Institution (PI), something I have argued for many times before. A Federal Payment Instutiton charter that