Happy Tuesday!
In this article:
HSBC Launch Virtual Debit Cards for UAE Businesses
The Quantum Theory Of Media
Pay As You Grow Allows Flexible Repayments on Bounce Back Loans for Smaller Biz
AI fairness is an economic and social imperative. Here's how to address it
A.I. Displays an unsettling skill: The ability to show empathy
Buy-now-pay-later fintechs such as Klarna face regulatory clampdown
HSBC Launch Virtual Debit Cards for UAE Businesses
HSBC has launched virtual debit cards for businesses in the UAE, a move that is a banking first in the Middle East. The launch reinforces HSBC’s commitment to pioneering digital enhancements to meet the rising demand for more flexible payment solutions.
HSBC’s Virtual Debit Cards, which operate on the Visa platform, generate single-use card numbers, or ‘tokens’, for each transaction, with the payment debited directly from the corporate cardholder’s current account. Using Visa’s Payables Automation platform, a card is distributed electronically, protecting the primary card number and providing enhanced payment security and efficiency.
The Quantum Theory Of Media
The digital media made the switching between streams of content not only easier but also tempting: the lion’s share of the content we receive digitally is about clicking the ever-more-interesting links and jumping to somewhere else. It was not that easy to switch between content streams in books; one couldn’t do so without switching the books themselves. Newspapers offered a mosaic, but the reader still stayed within the same physical print issue. Old media kept users imprisoned within an allotted chunk of content.
When magazine publishers decided to advertise magazine reading in 2010 (in those romantic times, they still hoped to return the readers to print), they used the image of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps and the motto: “We surf the Internet, we swim in magazines”
Pay As You Grow Allows Flexible Repayments on Bounce Back Loans for Smaller Biz
The British Business Bank, the UK’s economic development bank, today announces further details of Pay As You Grow, which helps UK smaller businesses that have taken out a Covid-19 emergency Bounce Back Loan to manage their cash flow and have a better chance of getting back to growth.
Originally announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in September 2020, Pay As You Grow (PAYG) will enable businesses who have started repaying their Bounce Back Loans to:
request an extension of their loan term to 10 years from six years, at the same fixed interest rate of 2.5%.
reduce their monthly repayments for six months by paying interest only. This option is available up to three times during the term of their Bounce Back Loan.
take a repayment holiday for up to six months. This option is available once during the term of their Bounce Back Loan.
AI fairness is an economic and social imperative. Here's how to address it
Humans have many kinds of bias; confirmation, anchoring and gender among them. Such biases may lead people to behave unfairly and, as such, as a society we try to mitigate them.
This is especially important when humans are in the position of taking high-stake decisions that impact others. We do so via a combination of education, conduct guidelines and regulations.
Now that artificial intelligence (AI) is providing an increasing number of recommendations to human decision-makers, it is important to make sure that, as a technology, it is not biased and thus respects the value of fairness.
A.I. Displays An Unsettling Skill: The Ability To Show Empathy
Using only visual data and no pre-programmed logic, researchers trained an A.I. to accurately predict the final action of a secondary robot "actor." At its peak, the A.I. could accurately predict the robot actor's final action (after only seeing its starting point) with 98.5 percent accuracy across four movement patterns.
THE BIG IDEA — Training an A.I. to predict the movement or pattern of something may be an impressive trick, but it's not necessarily revolutionary. What sets their approach apart, write the authors, is that they've developed an A.I. that doesn't just predict the next frame of an action (e.g. if one video frame shows a soccer ball being kicked it will predict the next frame will show the ball in the air) but instead to predict the final frame of a sequence of actions (e.g. the opposing goalie intercepting the shot at the last moment.)
Using visual information alone to make these predictions, the authors explain that successful prediction of the robot actor's movement can then represent a primitive understanding of its goals — a kind of social cognition that is similar to empathy in humans.
Buy-now-pay-later fintechs such as Klarna face regulatory clampdown
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority will regulate buy-now-pay-later agreements used by companies such as Klarna after a government review found potential for consumer harm.
“Buy-now-pay-later can be a helpful way to manage your finances but it is important that consumers are protected as these agreements become more popular. By stepping in and regulating, we’re making sure people are treated fairly and only offered agreements they can afford – the same protections you’d expect with other loans,” John Glen, economic secretary to the Treasury said.
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