Snippings

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Most importantly, over half of WeChat users have been persuaded to link their bank cards to the app. That is a notable achievement given that China’s is a distrustful society and the internet is a free-for-all of cybercrime, malware and scams. Yet using its trusted brand, and putting to work robust identity and password authentication, Tencent was able to win over the public.

From WeChat’s world | The Economist

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Here’s another one of this elite milestones that don’t seem much at the time, but when you look back on it from the future it will be seen in retrospect as a key moment.

We’re excited to announce TransferWise’s integration into the UK’s Faster Payments Service (FPS) as technical partner to Raphaels Bank… The integration has been made possible by the Faster Payment Scheme Limited’s (FPSL) New Access Model.

From TransferWise the first tech company with direct access to UK Faster Payments Service – TransferWise

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The American chip and PIN rollout seems to be pottering along nicely. Whereas in England, for example, you pay at gas pumps by inserting a chip card and entering your PIN, or in certain technologically-sophisticated parts of the country (e.g., Addlestone) by using your Shell mobile app, and despite it being several years since to my certain memory my colleagues at Consult Hyperion had a Dresser Wayne pump control with a contactless interface down at CHYP End, in Texas you pay using a trivially-counterfeitable magnetic stripe card. Naturally, freelance card data entrepreneurs know which they prefer.

At least five Exxon stations in the North Dallas area recently have been targeted by tech-savvy criminals who installed Bluetooth-equipped skimming machines on gas pumps, authorities told Fox 4 News… To avoid becoming a victim, police told Fox 4 News that it is advised to pay inside and use cash when possible.

From Criminals using Bluetooth to steal credit card info at gas stations, police warn | Fox News

There you go. In 2016, the official police advice for dealing with card fraud is… use cash instead.

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But it’s biggest problem are those trolls. They’re winning. Too often Twitter’s users are subject to pernicious streams of abuse and harassment. This dissuades new users from wanting to sign up, drives formerly loyal tweeters to close their accounts, and gives advertisers pause as they consider where to place their brand dollars.

From Stopping Trolls Is Now Life and Death for Twitter — Backchannel

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The 1,000-year-old practice of recording laws on goat and calf skin may be saved, after the House of Lords said it would consider an offer from the Cabinet Office to pay the costs of carrying on the tradition.

From Tradition of recording UK laws on vellum may be saved | Politics | The Guardian

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It’s the banks, credit card companies, merchants, payment processors, terminal manufacturers and many others that have created this checkout catastrophe. But there’s a ray of hope: your smartphone.

From Chip Card Nightmares? Help Is on the Way – WSJ

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A while back, my old chum Ed Conway from Sky TV (better known for his foreword to Identity is the New Money, of course) ran a nice story about the British cash paradox. It turns out that since the #Brexit vote, the amount of cash “in circulation” has soared (it’s gone up by nearly two billion quid since B-day, as I call it). While the use of cash for transactions has continued to fall, the amount of cash just generally hanging around has continued to rise.

The growth rate of cash in circulation has more than doubled since January, when it was running at 4% a year, with a sudden acceleration in the weeks following the EU poll.

From More People Keeping Cash Outside Banks

Ed asks whether the cash has been hoarded, stashed or exported. I wrote about this following the Bank of England’s analysis of the situation last year, noting that 

The interesting question that the Quarterly Bulletin article by Tom Fish and Roy Whymark stimulates is straightforward: “if the majority of Bank of England notes are not being used for everyday transactions in the domestic economy, what are they being used for?”

From Where is the aggregate demand for cash coming from? | Consult Hyperion

Since the Bank of England’s own estimate is that about a quarter of the cash out there is used for “transactional purposes” and since the size of the black economy can be reasonably estimated, the answer seems to be that they are mainly used for tax evasion (primarily by SMEs), money laundering (only 0.75% of money laundering flows in the UK are intercepted), drug dealing and corruption.

We see the same phenomenon in America. The amount of cash out there continues to rise but the use of that cash continues to fall.

The use of cash has fallen more than 50% in the last four years and is projected to continue to fall as consumers look for faster and secure means of paying options. With a high degree of smartphone penetration in the US market, mobile and digital payments are rapidly gaining a market share in digital payments.

From Americans Are Using Less Cash but Mobile Payments Are Not The Ones Replacing It | Let’s Talk Payments

So we that that in the US, as in the UK and many other countries, the rise of contactless and mobile payments means that the use of cash for retail transactions is falling steadily. (Contactless transactions have now reached £2 billion per month in the UK.) It is interesting, however, that in the US there seems to be much more resistance to cashlessness than in the Netherlands or Denmark or elsewhere. In his new book “The Curse of Cash”, former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff says (page 111) that in America “people pay by cash for small transactions to avoid credit card theft”. Is this true? I realise that in America they still use magnetic stripes (which is why America accounts for half of all the card fraud in the world although it is only a fifth of the volume). I always use cards in the US — since I don’t care if the card details get stolen as it the banks’ problem and not mine — and I get really annoyed when I go to a coffee shop or something and it doesn’t take cards. But perhaps our American correspondents could enlighten us on this.

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Information platforms such as 58.com, ganji.com and douban.com bear thousands of messages about how to rent student cards from different universities… The price of such cards ranges from less than 100 yuan to more than 1,000 yuan. Some cards are only available for only three months and other require a security deposit.

From Students Rent ID Cards for Summer Profit (Local) | BEIJING TODAY

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Remember when Gill Ringland spoke at the Tomorrow’s Transactions Forum a few years ago and talked about a new class of demographic assets that would confer the right to go to certain places.

The most popular campus ID cards are Peking University’s. The average Peking University card rents for 500 to 1,200 yuan per month and allows the cardholder to access the university library, teaching buildings and restaurants.

From Students Rent ID Cards for Summer Profit (Local) | BEIJING TODAY

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The information includes citizen resident numbers, passport information, home addresses, bank account details, phone numbers and family relations records. The information, saved on the company’s website (flyasiana.com) for the past several years, is believed to have been compromised.

From [EXCLUSIVE] Asiana Airlines’ customer database leaked on Internet

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Around 3 million mobile phone connections have been disconnected in Saudi after users failed to register their fingerprints in line with the new security measure instated by the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC).

From 3 million Saudi mobile phone connections cut due to fingerprint law – Technology – ArabianBusiness.com

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