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Nigeria Foreign Reserves Fall in November; Markets on Standby

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By Lukman Otunuga, Senior Research Analyst at FXTM,

The Naira may struggle to maintain stability against the Dollar after Nigeria’s foreign exchange reserves decreased to $39.83 billion in November from $40.55 billion in October of 2019.

Falling foreign reserves could complicate the Central Bank of Nigeria’s efforts in defending the Naira against domestic and external risks. Further signs of reserves declining is likely to trigger speculation around the Naira depreciating which could translate to rising inflationary pressures. Given how inflation is already at a 17-month high at 11.61%, the CBN is seen standing pat on interest rates in the short to medium term.

Markets in wait-and-see mode amid trade uncertainty

Another week, another record high for US stock markets despite renewed uncertainty and mixed messages from the US-China trade front.

Global equity bulls were initially inspired by positive US economic data mid-week as third quarter GDP growth and durable goods orders exceeded market expectations, but trade woes lingered in the background. The fiery optimism revolving around a “phase one” deal between the United States and China was quelled after Donald Trump signed a bill backing Hong Kong protesters. Given the complex and intricate relationship between Hong Kong and China, this move by Washington will certainly raise concerns over the possibility of a US-China trade deal.

This negative sentiment is already being reflected Asian markets on Friday with regional shares retreating as the month comes to an end. With China threatening that it would take “firm countermeasures” against the United States, investors may start questioning whether the “phase one” trade deal will be signed in 2019. Until there is fresh clarity and direction on the progress of US-China trade talks, markets may enter a wait-and-see mode as the year slowly comes to an end.

Sterling outlook influenced by polls

Buying sentiment towards the British Pound received and explosive boost mid-week after a closely watched poll projected a Conservative election victory.

A Boris Johnson win may signal the end of a lengthy Brexit deadlock with the UK possibly leaving the European Union before the January 31 2020 deadline. Such a market friendly outcome has the potential the push the GBPUSD above 1.3000 and beyond. Alternatively, if the general elections results in a hung parliament and Brexit remains in limbo, the uncertainty is likely to weaken Sterling against every single G10 currency.

Dollar supported by positive US data

Encouraging economic data from the largest economy in the world continues to support the Greenback.

Sentiment towards the US economy has received a boost after third quarter economic growth and durable goods orders both exceeded market expectations. With the data surprise reducing market expectations over the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates anytime soon, the Dollar is poised to push higher.

In regards to the technical picture, the Dollar Index is trading around 98.35 as of writing. An intraday breakout above 98.50 should encourage a move towards 99.00 and beyond.

Commodity spotlight – Gold

Gold is on track to end November shedding almost 4%, its worst monthly decline since November 2016.

Explosive levels of optimism over US-China trade talks, positive economic data from the United States and the Federal Reserve hinting a pause in cutting interest rates reduced appetite for Gold. Although bulls have lost the battle this month, the war still rages on. Given how the next tariff deadline falls on December 15th where additional U.S levies on Chinese exports will go into effect, Gold has the potential to shine as the year slowly comes to an end.

Escalating trade tensions are poised to rekindle fears over slowing global growth and speculation around central banks across the world easing monetary policy. The return of risk aversion and expectations over lower interest rates should turbocharge buying sentiment towards Gold which has gained roughly 13.50% year-to-date (YTD).

Focusing on the technical picture, the precious metal is attempting to rebound on the daily timeframe. A breakout above $1459 should encourage move higher towards $1463 and $1475.

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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

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InDrive, an e-hailing firm, announced app upgrades as well as new safety details for riders and drivers.

InDrive’s updated Safety Centre now allows its support team to contact a user’s trusted contacts in emergencies and the number of trusted contacts has been increased from one to five. InDrive says that it is also easier for its support team to share information with emergency services, among other things.

Also, the company said by clicking on the app’s SOS-button, users can see all the information needed when requesting help or reporting an incident – along with a button to call police or ambulance services.

InDrive’s app design has also been updated to improve user experience, making the Safety Centre more visible, it said.

Further, the company said: “inDrive is also testing photo sharing and automatic translation of chat messages, which have been added to the in-app chat function. These make it easier for the driver and rider to clarify the pickup point, and communicate in the same language while traveling.

“Passengers and drivers stay within the application when using these features, so there’s no need to use across other platforms, thereby protecting personal information. For now the feature is currently being tested by a limited number of users to improve its functionality before it is rolled out to everyone.”

The announcement today comes after the company recently revealed it had expanded its financing arrangement with General Catalyst to $146 million, allowing the company to engage in product upgrades, extend its service offerings, and enter new markets in Africa.


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NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

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Telecommunications operators in the country are gearing up for another round of disconnections of phone lines for subscribers who have failed to link their National Identification Numbers (NIN) with their SIM cards.

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

The disconnection which will happen Friday, March 29, following a directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) requiring all registered SIMs lacking proper NIN linkage to be either corrected or completely disconnected from networks.

The ongoing process, which commenced on February 28, 2024, is part of the government’s efforts to curb criminal activities like banditry and kidnapping, contributing to enhancing national security.

There are indications of a potential third phase in April 2024.

Operators have reportedly cooperated with the NCC in executing the directive, affirming their commitment to national security objectives and assuring full compliance by the specified deadlines.

The second phase will target subscribers with five or more SIMs from a single operator lacking verified NIN-SIM linkages.

The third phase, set to commence on April 15, will focus on subscribers with four SIMs or fewer and unverified NINs.

While telecom companies seek a review and extension of the April deadline for the third phase, indications from the NCC suggest a steadfast adherence to the established timelines.

The first phase saw the barring of 40 million lines, comprising around 17 million active SIMs without NIN submissions and 23 million inactive SIMs lacking NINs over the past year.

 

 

 

 


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