David G.W. Birch
@dgwbirch.bsky.social
Author, advisor and commentator on digital financial services.
Excellent piece from Gam. Nobody Agreed What A Trusted (Personal) Agent Is buff.ly/5A9MgOf "Meta, Google and X all launched Personal AI this month. Payments spent two years preparing for this. Retail, travel and insurance did not."
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nobody-agreed-what-trusted-personal-agent-gam-dias-0wxbe/
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This is quite interesting, if you are interested in this sort of thing. "The offline digital euro: when the secure element fails, what remains?" Thanks for the pointer #OMFIF buff.ly/gQsU0SD
The offline digital euro: when the secure element fails, what remains? - OMFIF
Two questions should be settled before the design is fixed
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Frites don’t fail me now buff.ly/Hp6KJyy "Futures regulation was shaped by the Great Maine Potato Default of 1976 — when short-sellers led by McDonald’s chip supplier JR Simplot made huge wrong-way bets" Yes, but this time it will be different, right?
Frites don’t fail me now
Also: hyperscalers, circular financing, AI slop, pervert glasses and justifiable murder
buff.ly
“Chalk Up 2026 as a Win for the Banks” Another must-read from Tim. CLARITY Act Fails — GENIUS Holds | Noyes Payments Blog buff.ly/7gSPyvR
Trump Is Looking for Diesel in All the Wrong Places buff.ly/JFSF3gv "One gas station in San Diego has been selling diesel for $9.99 a gallon, which is as high as its three-digit physical display will permit" It's the #ExcelliumBug.
Trump Is Looking for Diesel in All the Wrong Places
A Russia-Ukraine cease-fire isn’t guaranteed to get prices down.
theatlantic.com
#Money2020ME Good panel discussion, thanks for giving me an A-Team to moderate. The issue of sovereignty came up more than once: CBDC vs. Stablecoins (vs. Interconnecting Instant Payments) has "geonomic" context that is nothing to do with blockchains.
New on the not-a-newsletter... A French Revolut-ion to celebrate International Identity Day... buff.ly/eim5Uyj I want my bank to look after my digital assets. Not me with a USB stick, not some crypto bros vibe coding firewalls, not a platform that will feed my data into an AI.
French Revolut-ion
Hey it’s international identity day tomorrow! We can all get together and celebrate everything being even more broken than it was last year.
dgwbirch.substack.com
🛡️ Belgian bank KBC has launched “guardian angel” for more than four million customers. A trusted contact can review suspicious payments before execution, targeting authorised push-payment scams. Could other banks follow? www.finextra.com/newsarticle/...
KBC brings 'guardian angel' to more than 4 million customers in Belgium
Guardian angel was developed to address common manipulation techniques used by scammers to trick people into authorising payments. Examples include romance scams and friendship scams, where people are emotionally manipulated, as well as account takeover schemes, impersonation scams and investment fraud schemes promising unrealistic returns.
finextra.com
I think it’s about time we had an official International Identity Day anthem. Here’s my suggestion for tomorrow, add yours. buff.ly/G8p41U1
Interesting data point at #Finovate. Bernadette Smith from Starking says that customers using their scan intelligence service at 300 times less likely to get scammed.
Learning about digital crime at #FinovateFall in New York. I’m always looking for tips just in case this whole consulting thing doesn’t work out. Nice intro from Daniel Latimore.
Identity Drama and Identity Crisis buff.ly/2NiDbGX We need know-your-agent (KYA) and we need it now. You already know this and are bored with me talking about it all the time. I'm talking about it again because I think it might bring pressure to fix personal identity and business identity as well.
Identity Drama and Identity Crisis
The need for agent identity is the trigger for fixing the problem of people identity.
dgwbirch.substack.com
Been looking forward to this #Stablecon panel all day. It’s Raj Parekh, Richard Widmann and Christian Catalini talking about money for agents.
It’s been nonstop today at #Stablecon in Washington DC but now I’ve got a chance to sit in and listen to some smart people. Up now It’s Jo Ann Barefoot, Ben Milne and Brian Laverdure. #TheMoneyIsTheMessage
Passengers sleep on floors buff.ly/r5dyEaf What reasonable sanctions should a civilised society to the people responsible for this national catastrophe? The usual British response is to let them fail upwards with a huge pension, but surely it is time for change.
Passengers sleep on floors and describe airport 'carnage' as hundreds more flights cancelled
Air traffic controller Nats has apologised for the technical issue, with the firm's boss Martin Rolfe due to meet the transport secretary later.
bbc.com
A third of the adverts on Meta properties are scams. Radio 4 - Listen Live - BBC Sounds buff.ly/fmXIP85
Radio 4 - Listen Live - BBC Sounds
Listen live to Radio 4 on BBC Sounds
bbc.co.uk
DNB: Netherlands bank moves billions in gold to London in 'crisis preparedness' move buff.ly/WCKYYJs "DNB said on Wednesday that 86 tonnes of gold had been removed from the US and Canada in a complex operation that took several months. It is now being held by the Bank of England."
DNB: Netherlands bank moves billions in gold to London in 'crisis preparedness' move
The Dutch central bank removes some of its gold reserves from the US and Canada, saying it is because of "increasing geopolitical unrest".
bbc.co.uk
Indonesia shuts airports as volcano erupts buff.ly/dDDLJ0L "Anak Krakatau, located between Java and Sumatra, has been erupting since late on Friday." For no reason, here's a picture of me on Anak Krakatoa. Ah, memories.
https://www.ft.com/content/64acb80a-b577-44cd-87c4-2ec979b76fff?desktop=true&segmentId=7c8f09b9-9b61-4fbb-9430-9208a9e233c8&syn-25a6b1a6=1#myft:notification:daily-email:content
ft.com
Patterns and centralisation in Ethereum-based token transaction networks buff.ly/zB0JKNC "The rich do get richer, even in Ethereum-based tokens"
Frontiers | Patterns and centralisation in Ethereum-based token transaction networks
We explore patterns, regularities, and correlations in the evolving landscape of Ethereum-based tokens, both ERC-20 (fungible) and ERC-721 (non-fungible) to ...
frontiersin.org
Excellent post from Tom: EMVCo Enters the Intent Wars blog.starpointllp.com/2026/09/emvc... "The framework sketches agent identification but does not define a registry, a qualification process, or liability allocation rules." We need KYA! Surely it makes sense as a bank business. Prove me wrong.
EMVCo Enters the Intent Wars | Noyes Payments Blog
September 2026 – VERY VERY LONG Tech Blog on EMVCo’s new Spec
blog.starpointllp.com
These Banks Are Banding Together to Launch a Stablecoin www.wsj.com/finance/bank... This is quite interesting, if you are interested in this sort of thing.
https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/these-banks-are-banding-together-to-launch-a-stablecoin-6de07eff?mod=Searchresults&pos=1&page=1
wsj.com
Smile! You're on Dyson's $500 toothbrush camera www.businessinsider.com/dyson-camera... Nothing new under the sun. Brett King showed me one of these last year!
Smile! You're on Dyson's $500 toothbrush camera
Cameras are in smart toilets, AI glasses, vacuums, fridges, and now ... toothbrushes? Dyson's latest CameraJet gadget is aimed at lazy flossers.
businessinsider.com
FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses – Krebs on Security ift.tt/q791jlD should further strengthen the resolve for people who are fighting back against online ID schemes which are requiring countless providers to ask for drivers licenses in order to access services"
FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses – Krebs on Security
A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews…
krebsonsecurity.com
🧠 EMVCo seeks feedback on agentic payments framework. Its proposed “Intent Services” could help share consumer-authorised instructions across card payments. The move brings standards discipline to a wider effort to make intent interoperable. www.finextra.com/pressarticle...
EMVCo reqests feedback on framework for card-based agentic payments
The framework provides a foundation for further industry engagement and potential specification development, with all interested stakeholders encouraged to provide their feedback on EMV® Agentic Payments - Framework for Specifications by Wednesday 30 September.
emvco.com
New on the not-a-newsletter "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15Mb"... They’re Blocky, But They’re Good buff.ly/gUOC4f3 It may well be that the use of digital currency for machine payments dominates by volume and leads to new business models. #x402 #micropayments #machinepayments #R2R
They’re Blocky, But They’re Good
It seems like everyone has a stablecoin these days. But you know what: the stablecoin revolution has not even started yet.
dgwbirch.substack.com
“Kidnapping is an especially lucrative business” 😱 #CBPCIstanbul learning about crime with Paulo Barbosa, Agathe Blaga, Rufaida Hamilton and Japan Manic.
Herve Tourpe presenting the IMF agentic commerce model at Central Bank Payments in Istanbul. #CBPCIstanbul
