👩‍⚖️ AML – the world's most in-effective policy?

Also:

  • 🏦 Everyone becoming a bank

  • 📐 How to measure design impact?

  • 💰 Visa buys Tink

  • ✋ DNB's acquisition of Sbanken stopped?

  • 🧮 The world's first authorization achieved by a Robo-advisor

  • 🙈 Scandinavia lagging on open banking

  • ⌨️ Software is a lever on the real world

🏦 Everyone becoming a bank

  • Amazon Prime members are willing to pay 10$ extra on their annual Prime fee to get a checking account from Amazon. So what's taking Amazon so long to offer an account? Link

  • What is Shopify? Your first guess might be an eCommerce platform, but Shopify has increasingly morphed into a payments company over the past few years. Last week the Canadian company announced that its payments business — now known as Shop Pay — will be available to users who sell on Facebook or Google properties starting this summer. Link

📐 How to measure design impact?

  • How do you know what design's impact is on the product you're building? Even if you could measure design, how do you identify what parts of the product experience are worth measuring in the first place? Link

  • How to get money, people, or priority for digital product development: Four simple tests you can do to convince your organization that they need to invest. Link

👩‍⚖️ AML is the world's most in-effective policy experiment

  • "AML policy has less than a 0.1 impact on criminal finances. Compliance costs exceed recovered illicit funds recovered more than 100x. Banks, taxpayers, and citizens are penalized more than criminals" Link

  • There is no general method to detect fraud: "The idea is that when people look at an illusion, they really consider only the reasonable ways by which the trick could have been achieved, mentally ruling out all the unreasonable ways. For a trick to work it needs to confound Occam's razor: there must be a complicated explanation. That goes for scams too. The best finesse layers are those that really seem too complicated to be worthwhile - but somehow are, often due to the large scale of the scam." Link

💰 Visa buys Tink

Last week Visa signed an agreement to acquire Tink, a Swedish aggregator company that will help Visa also deliver account-to-account payments. The move comes in the aftermath of Visas' failed attempt to buy Plaid after hitting a regulatory wall. The only thing standing in the way now is Swedish and European competition authorities.

[This purchase means that] Visa could start to own or aggregate identify via open banking with a watermark, making "instant KYC" a thing (this could be huge) Simon Taylor, Fintech Brain Food

  • How Mastercard and Visa are beating the tech giants at their own game Link

  • Mastercard reveals it's looking at the payment opportunities that could arise from creating an on-demand autonomous vehicle platform. link

✋ DNB's acquisition of Sbanken stopped?

The Norwegian Competition Authority is considering intervening against DNB's acquisition of Sbanken. Following a preliminary assessment, the Authority has concluded that the acquisition could weaken competition in the market for savings in funds. This could lead to higher prices and be detrimental to Norwegian consumers that want to save in funds. Link

🧮 The world's first authorization achieved by a Robo-advisor

While we're talking about Sbanken and saving in funds: More than 12 000 financial advisers are authorized in Norway through the financial industry's authorization scheme, FinAut.

Last week Sbanken became the first in the world to achieve authorization for its Robo-advisor in savings and investments powered by Quantfolio. I know it has been in the works for a long time, considering I contributed to the first versions of the project over four years ago. Link

🙈 Scandinavia lagging on open banking

Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland are lagging on the adoption of open banking in Europe. All the countries have good regulatory supervision with some guidance provided around Open Banking implementation but lag someone to help centralize standardization and drive technical standards. Link

⌨️ Software is a lever on the real world

Software is a lever on the real world.

Someone writes code, and all of a sudden, riders and drivers coordinate a completely new kind of real-world transportation system, and we call it Lyft. Someone writes code, and all of a sudden, homeowners and guests coordinate a completely new kind of real-world real estate system, and we call it Airbnb. Someone writes code, etc., and we have cars that drive themselves, and planes that fly themselves, and wristwatches that tell us if we're healthy or ill.

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Marius Hauken, partner Stacc X

PS: We're taking a well-deserved vacation, but will come back strong with more news and analysis in August!