Snippings

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Legislation on stablecoins could threaten banks’ role in the financial system. Customers could potentially stash their cash in stablecoins rather than bank deposits and move money without going through banks.

From: Trump’s Stablecoin Push Set to Collide With Banks — The Information.

Looking after customers’ money and moving money around are two different things. Yes, they are muddled together in commercial banks right now, but there is no reason for this to continue. In fact it may be better all round if they are disentangled.

If you look at the US, then stablecoins might well take away some of the banks’ payment revenues but could offer significant benefits to customers. Conversely, stablecoins will not take away bank deposits because they are for transacitonal 

 

I wonder if in the long run customers will either know or care.

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✅ Reputation & Trust Signals → AI agents will prioritise trusted brands—reputation, verified reviews, and sustainability metrics may replace traditional ad targeting.

From: Marketing in the Age of AI Agents: Who Are You Advertising To? 🧍🏻or 🤖 | LinkedIn.

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Ken Mandel puts it this way

The Shift in Advertising

Today: 👩🔧 Humans see and interact with ads.

Near Future: 🤖 AI agents filter everything—they see the ads, not humans.

Not so Distant Future: 🔮 Via new “AdTech” infrastructures, Brands, AI Agents & Ad Agencies will communicate through highly efficient structured data sets. Think code not copy.

From: Marketing in the Age of AI Agents: Who Are You Advertising To? 🧍🏻or 🤖 | LinkedIn.

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Spain has launched a mobile version of its National Identity Document (DNI), allowing citizens to carry official ID on their smartphones via a new government app. Approved by the Council of Ministers, the initiative is part of Spain’s broader push to digitise public services.

The digital DNI will be available through the MiDNI app,

From: Digital Identity: Global Roundup | THINK Digital Partners : THINK Digital Partners.

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British supermarket chain Asda kicked off a live facial recognition trial in five of its stores in an attempt to increase security amid a rise in retail crime. The facial recognition system is supplied by UK-based startup FaiceTech. The Manchester-headquartered company claims that its edge-based live facial recognition system FaiceAlert has a 99.992 percent matching accuracy when matching faces 1:N.

From: Digital Identity: Global Roundup | THINK Digital Partners : THINK Digital Partners.

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Researchers from the UK’s National Health Service have identified a possible unexpected benefit of the rise in contactless payments: fewer children are turning up at hospitals after swallowing coins.

From: Coin-cidence? Is cashless society leading to few kids eating coins?.

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Earlier this year, employees at online diaper seller Coterie noticed customers arriving from an intriguing new source—ChatGPT.

Coterie, like most brands, asks its customers how they heard about the company after they make a purchase. The typical answer is word of mouth. But in recent months, some shoppers started crediting their purchase to OpenAI’s popular artificial intelligence chatbot, which added real-time search features last fall, making it a more important source of inspiration for shoppers—and of business for retailers.

From: AI Search Is New Arms Race for Retailers — The Information.

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With the arrival of AI agents, businesses are looking at growing future opportunities. One of them is granting access to AI agents to our verifiable credentials (VCs) to act on our behalf

From: AI agents and verifiable credentials: A match made in heaven? | Biometric Update.

Actually, I think that’s not quite right. We don’t want AIs to present our verifiable credentials we want AIs to present their own verifiable credentials that we have consented to authorise. In other words, my bot shouldn’t show up at a bank pretending to me: it should show up at a bank as a bot acting on my behalf. Now, this makes digital identity for bots more complicated, but also more flexible. Jelena Hoffart of Mastercard and I have written a paper about this for the Journal of Digital Banking.

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Identity Verification: The MCP server validates the agent’s credential against a registry, ensuring it’s not a rogue actor. Think of this as a KYC for AI—only trusted agents get in.

From: Agentic Commerce and the Payment Networks.

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Frank Young summarises this quite well

We need to draw a clear distinction to delineate where MCP can add value and where existing capabilities work just fine. Why build MCP gateways when current APIs already shine for simple flows?

Stick with APIs: For scaled, simple flows (subscriptions, point-of-sale), lean on current infrastructure—don’t fix what isn’t broken.
Leverage MCP: For agentic commerce’s frontier (negotiation, fraud response, optimization), build MCP gateways and token flows to capture these complex, high-value scenarios.

From: Agentic Commerce and the Payment Networks.

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