Did you hear the earthquake? 🫨 Been shopping recently? 🛒 Banks and GenAI: A double-edged sword, 🗡️18 Fintech sectors to follow in 2024
Did you hear the earthquake? 🫨 Been shopping recently? 🛒 Banks and GenAI: A double-edged sword, 🗡️18 Fintech sectors to follow in 2024
This week's stories are a contrast of light and shadow!
Artwork of the day: Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer c. 1665
Girl with a Pearl Earring is Vermeer’s most famous painting. It is not a portrait, but a ‘tronie’ – a painting of an imaginary figure. Tronies depict a certain type or character; in this case a girl in exotic dress, wearing an oriental turban and an improbably large pearl in her ear.
Vermeer was the master of light. Light, typically daylight, permeates his scenes, beautifully rendering his subjects using light and shadow. This is shown here in the softness of the girl’s face and the glimmers of light on her moist lips. And of course, the shining pearl.
This week’s stories are a contrast of light and shadow just like the Vermeer above.
In the shadows, we have the biggest news story of the fintech world that you never heard about! The first CBDC transfer between China and the UAE got little news coverage and remains in the shadows despite it being an earthquake of 8 on the Richter scale.
Also hidden in the shadows are the exorbitant fees credit card companies charge merchants. JP Morgan’s report of the future of shopping sheds no light on these charges, and shopping’s future is bleak without fast and free payments.
In contrast, GenAI’s use in banking is in the glaring spotlight! Banks, of course, are big users, and stories abound. The problem is that GenAI will be a double-edged sword for banks, increasing productivity and driving layoffs.
Fintech is also always in the light, and this week, we’ve got a granular look at 18 fintech sectors you need to follow. Did I say 18? How’s that for granular?
By the way, this would be a great time to share this newsletter with a friend!
Did you hear the earthquake? China and UAE complete a cross-border CBDC transfer
mBridge explained: here
Did you hear the earthquake? UAE-CHINA CBDC USD 13 million Cross-Border Payment on mBridge💥
A short comment on how the world just changed with the first cross-border payment on mBridge in Hong Kong.
👉TAKEAWAYS
🔹e-dirham 50 million ($13.6m) was just sent to China and converted to e-CNY in China.
🔹 This payment marks the first use of direct cross-border CBDC transfer using the blockchain-based mBridge CBDC transfer technology
🔹mBridge is a direct threat to SWIFT cross-border transfers
🔹Sanctions on mBridge are enacted by the transfer parties, NOT the mBridge operating system itself, unlike SWIFT.
🔹 mBridge is a multi-CBDC platform that supports real-time, peer-to-peer, cross-border payments and foreign exchange transactions using CBDCs.
🔹mBridge is sponsored by 4 central banks and the BIS Innovation Hub: Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), the Bank of Thailand (BoT), the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates (CBUAE), the Digital Currency Research Institute of the People's Bank of China (PBC DCI).
👊STRAIGHT TALK👊
Today the earth just shook in the international payment world.
You may not have felt or heard it, but it was an eight on the Richter scale with the first cross-border CBDC transfer on the BIS's mBridge.
It is an earthquake because you just witnessed the beginning of a non-dollar-based energy market, a direct assault on the petro-dollar and a practical model for de-dollarization.
A petro-yuan and de-dollarization won't happen overnight; expect this to be a ten-year process, with the dollar retaining a sizable lead.
That said, you can expect e-CNY payments for oil over the mBridge network within the next year and, with it, a slow change.
The e-CNY has already been used for a USD 90 million oil payment in China. The next step is that it goes global.
"Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming," David Bowie
Banks and GenAI: A double edged sword
Productivity, Profits and Layoffs!
Part 1:
Part 2
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GenAI ist a nightmare for the customers (of banks) in the first place.
Until now I had mostly relatively positive experiences with my banks customer support. I could expect competence and some kind of answer. But it is obvious to me, that GenAI will be used instead of human customer support, not only for lowering the cost but also for keeping customers at distance and prevent customers needs to be heard by anyone. With Amazon it is already very difficult to get a reasonable response from the support, even being in an elevated program like "Vine product tester". It becomes obvious, that algorithms not only (often wrongly and against well known internal rules) select products for testing but also censor reviews (wrongly). Next thing will be to handle the complaints about wrongly censored reviews. You will end up in endless fruitless loops, starting from the "press 1 if..." on telephone to chat "I could not understand You f+++king I+++t of a machine." The patience of the GenAI wile sucking up the live vital from the customer will be total.