Monthly Archives: August 2019

The news sparked interest because Amazon is at the center of a political tussle over the accuracy and regulation of facial recognition. Amazon sells a facial-recognition service, part of a suite of image-analysis features called Rekognition, to customers that include police departments. Another Rekognition service tries to discern the gender of faces in photos. The company said Monday that the gender feature had been improved—apparently a response to research showing it was much less accurate for people with darker skin.Rekognition has been assessing emotions in faces along a sliding scale for seven categories: “happy,” “sad,” “angry,” “surprised,” “disgusted,” “calm,” and “confused.” Fear, added Monday, is the eighth.Amazon isn't the first company to offer developers access to algorithms that claim to detect emotions. Microsoft has had similar offerings since 2015; its service looks for a similar list of emotions, adding “contempt” but deleting confusion. Google has offered its own similar service since 2016.Amazon declined to detail how customers are using emotion recognition. Online documentation for Rekognition warns that the service “is not a determination of the person’s internal emotional state and should not be used in such a way." But on its Rekognition website, Amazon, whose ecommerce business has squeezed brick-and-mortar retailers in part via deep data on consumers, suggests that stores could feed live images of shoppers into its face-analysis tools to track emotional and demographic trends at different retail locations over time.

The most recent country to claim that its CBDC is near completion is China. According to media reports, The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) is “almost ready” to issue the country’s own sovereign digital currency. This was revealed at a forum held in the northern Chinese province of Heilongjiang on Aug. 10 by Mu Changchun, deputy director of the PBOC’s payments department.He explained that the CBDC will use a two-tier system where both the central bank and financial institutions will be legitimate issuers, Reuters conveyed, noting that “the digital currency would not solely rely on blockchain technology as current blockchain technology would not be able to handle transaction volumes in China.” The publication added that the PBOC started researching the possibility of launching its own CBDC in 2014 with the aim “to cut the costs of circulating traditional paper money and boost policymakers’ control of money supply.”Trial Between Singapore and CanadaThe Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Bank of Canada have jointly conducted an experiment on cross-border and cross-currency payments using CBDCs. The two central banks linked up their respective experimental domestic payment networks — Project Jasper and Project Ubin — built on two different distributed ledger technology (DLT) platforms, the MAS described in May. The trial was carried out in partnership with Accenture and J.P. Morgan. The former supported the development of the Canadian network on Corda, while the latter supported the Singapore network on Quorum.

On Monday Argentina’s peso currency dropped over 30% in value to a record low of 65 pesos per 1 U.S. dollar. The country’s central bank intervened in the foreign exchange market, using its reserves to prop up the peso, but it still ended the day around 15% down. At the same time, the Argentine equity markets were doing even worse, with the country’s benchmark S&P Merval Index losing almost half its value in dollar terms. This was the worst daily performance by any stock market in the world for the past three decades and only the second worst in the last 70 years.In case you missed the news, don’t worry, no foreign power has declared war on Argentina, nor has Buenos Aires been hit by a giant meteor. Instead, the event that triggered such a major financial crisis, with people seeing so much of their life’s savings vanishing into thin air overnight, was just a routine election. On Sunday there was a primary vote that signaled that the current politician in charge of the government might be replaced by another one in a few months, which was enough to send the markets tumbling in historic proportions.Eva Peron’s portrait on the Argentine 100 peso billLooking at the details of the elections that spooked the markets and led to the collapse of the Argentine peso shows that there is room for some concern. The current president of the country, Mauricio Macri, is at least perceived to have tried to fix some of the structural problems of the local economy, even if his detractors can say that he has failed in doing so. His opposition, on the other hand, the Peronist Alberto Fernández and former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, are considered to be left wing populists who could set the country back with disastrous policies that will wreck Argentina’s economy once more. Regardless of whether these perceptions are true, the fact is that enough investors hold the news that the opposition might assume control of the government from Macri to be a serious threat to stability.

Ron Paul, the muckraking former congressman from Texas, is stirring things up once again, this time taking aim at the new real-time digital payment system proposed last week by the U.S. Federal Reserve. Presented as an innovative solution by government and media voices, the cryptosphere received the news of the Fednow program with little more than a disinterested shrug. Paul is not impressed either, maintaining that the implementation will crowd out competing protocols like Bitcoin, placing even more power in the hands of an already dangerously incompetent federal government.

Danske Bank, the troubled Danish institution which is struggling to overcome the consequences of a large money laundering scandal, is among those European banks that have been dealing in negative interest rates the longest. Denmark was arguably the first country on the continent to introduce them after the 2008 crash. In the summer of 2012, the central bank lowered its benchmark rate to -0.2% and has kept it around or below zero ever since.Benchmark interest rate in DenmarkWith unprecedented low interest rates in Europe, many financial institutions have made a decision to pass the burden on to their account holders and even introduce fees on large cash balances. However, Danske has recently vowed not to punish its wealthy depositors with additional charges, unlike other major banks in the region. Chief Financial Officer Christian Baltzer warned in a recent interview with Bloomberg that charging customers with large deposits could pose a risk to society, as he put it.Baltzer said that Danske acknowledges the difficult conditions in the financial sector, but emphasized Denmark’s leading bank does not plan to impose negative interest rates on personal savings or current accounts. In his opinion, charging private customers to hold money in their accounts could add new risks, one of which would be the erosion of the progress toward developing a cashless society. He further commented:Doing so could have a negative impact at the societal level, including the risk of customers withdrawing more deposits in cash.Negative interest rates are becoming the norm in Denmark, and corporate clients have already felt the brunt of the shift. Some banks admit they are about to pass the costs to retail depositors as well, something Danske views as a risky move and states they’re not even considering. Also, the Danish bankers association is now trying to convince Denmark’s central bank to introduce measures mitigating the pain for account holders.Sub-zero rates have left investors in the Nordic country and elsewhere in Europe with very few options. Denmark’s government debt is currently trading at negative yields across all maturities. For example, the yield on the 10-year bonds has dropped to -0.6%. By the way, that’s not a phenomenon isolated only to the Scandinavian region. Bond yields in the rest of Europe and in industrialized countries elsewhere have been close to zero or negative for some time.

Le top 10 des meilleurs établissements d'enseignement supérieur du monde est identique à l'an dernier, avec huit universités américaines. Le premier établissement français est 37e.Indétrônable ? Pour la 17e année consécutive, Harvard figure en tête du classement de Shanghai, publié ce jeudi. Réalisé par le cabinet indépendant Shanghai Ranking Consultancy, il distingue depuis 2003 les meilleurs établissements d'enseignement supérieur du monde.  Cette année, le top 10, composé de huit universités américaines et deux britanniques, est identique à celui de 2018. Harvard devance sa compatriote Stanford. L'université britannique Cambridge conserve la troisième place du podium. Se retrouvent ensuite les Américaines MIT (4e), Berkeley (5e) et Princeton (6e).  Comme en 2018, seules quatre universités non-américaines atteignent le top 20 : les Britanniques Cambridge, Oxford (7e place) et University College de Londres (15e, +2 places), tandis que l'Institut fédéral de technologie de Zurich pointe à la 19e place (inchangé). L'Université Paris-Sud arrive à la 37e placeLa première université française, Paris-Sud, gagne cinq places et pointe en 37e position du classement. La Sorbonne (44e) perd huit places et l'Ecole normale supérieure (79e) en perd quinze. Alain Sarfati, président de l'université Paris-Sud, a partagé son "sentiment de fierté" sur France Info, ce jeudi. Il a néanmoins déclaré qu'il fallait "prendre tout ça avec beaucoup de recul", expliquant notamment que le classement de Shanghai "n'a pas vocation à juger la qualité d'une université sur l'ensemble de ses missions, mais sur l'avancée des connaissances". Il a tout de même ajouté : "Il y aura des choses à redire, mais en tout cas il y a une certaine pertinence et une cohérence dans ce classement d'une année sur l'autre. Ça nous apporte une visibilité. Qu'on soit d'accord avec les critères ou pas, c'est un classement qui est vu et ausculté par beaucoup de monde". 

Offering consumers luxury beauty products at face value prices, online disruptor Beauty Pie has carved out a niche as a direct-to-consumer brand founded on the psychology behind consumer behaviour.Based on a tiered membership model, users can choose a £99 one-off yearly Beauty Pie subscription or a monthly fee of £5, £10 or £20, which comes with a monthly spending limit. Users then get access to buyers’ club prices, which are the face value prices for skincare, make-up and haircare products bought directly from the lab.Central to the insight strategy is working with psychologists to better understand the fundamentals of human nature and then layer this on top of the subscription data to tailor the consumer journey.Psychologists have found, for example, that 60% of purchasing behaviour is driven by loneliness, cites Beauty Pie’s global head of marketing, Sophie Jenkins.“If you feel lonely and you want to be made to feel secure and safe you buy something, whether that’s buying something because somebody else has bought it, because you think you’re missing out, to make you feel better, or to be part of a community,” she explains.“For us, it’s about understanding these real human fundamentals before we then look at the data and the conversations that are happening from our consumers’ perspective.”In the normal beauty market, loyalty is hard to come by, so having data that shows what your customer is doing from month to month is gold dust.The marketers conduct qualitative research with Beauty Pie members to find out why they joined the service and feed this insight into the customer service and social media platforms.Then to better understand which products are resonating with customers the team analyse purchase behaviour each month. This data is crucial as, despite being just two years old, Beauty Pie is launching a product a week across haircare, bodycare, skincare and make-up. Its current bestsellers are its Japan Fusion Cleanser and Uber Volume Mascara.The distinct advantage of being a direct-to-consumer brand is owning first-party consumer data, says Jenkins, which is much harder to come by if you sell via a retailer, meaning the brand feels much more connected to its customer.“In the normal beauty market, loyalty is hard to come by,” she claims. “So, having data that shows what your customer is doing from month to month is gold dust.”Jenkins says Beauty Pie does not have a core customer, although she imagines that this may change as the business matures, and it becomes clearer who is loyal to the brand and who drops out. In this sense Beauty Pie is different to other luxury beauty brands she has worked for, such as Chanel and Estée Lauder.“Working for brands previously you had an audience in mind, you knew who you were targeting, you knew your product and the price. It was super easy,” she states.“At Beauty Pie our model has broken down so many other barriers that essentially we haven’t even split our audience; we are marketing to everyone from 15-years-old to 60-years-old.”Creating a buyers’ clubBeauty Pie was founded in 2017 by entrepreneur Marcia Kilgore, the woman behind Bliss, Soap & Glory and FitFlop, as a female-centric company aimed at disrupting the luxury beauty giants by going direct-to-consumer.Beauty Pie’s USP is its ‘transparent pricing model’. The brand buys direct from labs, meaning members pay for the product, packaging, new product development, safety testing and warehousing, but not the added marketing costs or retailer mark-ups.This price is then contrasted against the typical price for each product, which Beauty Pie calculates by comparing the formulation, packaging, ingredients, uses, claims and product size of similar products from established online and offline competitors.Beauty Pie’s subscription model gives users an allowance to spend each month.Jenkins describes Beauty Pie as essentially boarding up Harrods, taking all the labels off the products and charging everyone £10 to go into the beauty hall to spend what they want within an allowance.Her team is focused on breaking down the barriers that could prevent consumers from signing up. Some people, for example, feel they don’t buy enough make-up or skincare to justify a monthly membership. This means talking about the 80% mark-up paid for luxury beauty products and the fact the allowance rolls over month to month.Other potential customers are nervous about being tied into memberships or subscription boxes, so here the focus is on giving free trials to demonstrate the value of the service.Then you have the beauty junkies who are unsure if they can trust the product really is luxury, which means giving out samples to let them try the quality. As consumers are used to luxury products being sold with high profile celebrity endorsements, this can take an adjustment.“That’s been a hard part of the education factor, because luxury is described as something at a big expense and Beauty Pie is trying to reverse that thought process. It’s not better if you’re paying more, it’s the stuff that’s not included in the formulation,” Jenkins states.Email, in particular, has proven a strong communications channel for Beauty Pie. The high open rates of its emails are driven by the fact that, as a membership service, people are interested in hearing from a brand they are actively paying for.Then on social there is a dedicated community manager promoting the roll-out of all new products. Through Beauty Pie Live on Facebook and Instagram the team debut these new items and ask the community for feedback, as well as canvassing their opinions on possible product names. Some members and key industry influencers, such as make-up artists and nail experts, are invited to test products before they launch.

Hoping to capitalize on the $8 trillion in disposable income claimed by people with disabilities, the beauty industry is making a push for diversity by creating more tactile products, OZY reports. Bathroom staples, such as Herbal Essences shampoos and conditioners, already feel noticeably different, making it easier for people with limited sight to distinguish. Meanwhile, easy-grip makeup brushes and cosmetic containers aid those with tremors and other disorders.What’s the challenge? Structural change depends on companies recognizing the problem in the first place: With 80 percent of blind people unemployed, most will never have the opportunity to convince their company to take disabled consumers into account.

La Fed prend à son tour le virage du paiement instantané. La Réserve fédérale américaine a annoncé la semaine dernière le développement de son propre système de paiement en temps réel.Baptisé « FedNow », ce dispositif devrait être disponible en 2023 ou 2024. Il « permettra aux banques de toutes les tailles […] d'effectuer des paiements en temps réel à leurs clients », explique Lael Brainard, membre du Conseil des gouverneurs de la Fed, citée dans un communiqué. La Fed fournira ainsi une alternative publique à la solution de paiement instantané proposée par les plus grandes banques américaines.Un projet concurrentDepuis 2017, plusieurs établissements, comme Bank of America, Citigroup, US Bancorp ou JP Morgan, ont investi environ 1 milliard de dollars pour développer leur propre système de paiement en temps réel, à travers le consortium « The Clearing House ». Les clients des banques partenaires peuvent ainsi transférer de l'argent immédiatement d'un compte à l'autre 24 heures sur 24, 7 jours sur 7.« FedNow » inclura aussi une fonctionnalité clef : l'instantanéité pour les compensations et règlements interbancaires. Les Etats-Unis accusent un retard en la matière par rapport au Mexique, l'Australie ou encore l'Europe , a souligné Lael Brainard dans un discours.Le projet de la Fed a suscité des critiques chez les banques américaines partenaires de « The Clearing House ». Selon elles, cela risque de retarder l'adoption du paiement instantané par les petites banques qui attendent le développement de la solution publique.

C'est parti pour le « Hulu » français. Après avoir obtenu un avis favorable du Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (CSA) le 17 juillet dernier, Salto, le service rattrapage de télévision et de vidéo à la demande des trois grands groupes français de télévision gratuite, a en effet reçu ce lundi  le feu vert de l'Autorité de la concurrence (AC), sous conditions .« Le lancement de l'offre commerciale de Salto est prévu au premier trimestre 2020 […], ont donc immédiatement communiqué France Télévisions, TF1 et M6 dans un texte commun. Il constituera une avancée majeure pour le secteur audiovisuel français, qui fait face à la concurrence frontale des plateformes internationales ».Un veto de l'antitrust français était difficile à imaginer tant la concurrence des nouveaux acteurs de la télévision de type Netflix et Amazon Prime Video se fait sentir, avec une  poursuite de la baisse de la durée d'écoute du petit écran traditionnel . Reste maintenant à affiner le modèle commercial et économique. Salto devrait comporter un segment à bas prix avec des fonctions de rattrapage améliorées par rapport à celles des chaînes de ses maisons-mères, et un segment plus onéreux de vidéo par abonnement de type Netflix. La société Salto qui va être créée devra répondre aux interrogations suivantes : les téléspectateurs seront-ils prêts à payer pour des fonctionnalités de « catch-up » alors qu'ils ont déjà accès aux programmes? Et pour le segment de type Netflix, quels seront les moyens de Salto pour acheter des contenus alléchants?