‘Place nose on dot.’ That’s what my screen is telling me to do as the first step in a ‘liveness’ test I must complete to be accepted as a signatory on a club bank account. But if I align the image of my face with the dot, nothing happens. If I press my nose to the screen, I go cross-eyed. And if the test’s purpose is to make sure I’m not dead, it would be simpler to ask me to shout at it. After the sixth failed attempt, that’s what I do – cursing the modern world in which identity fraud is so prevalent that all new connections between customers and banks have to be preceded by elaborate proofs like this one (bought in from a Californian software company), while somewhere out there, most likely in Russia, industrial-scale fraudsters are scamming tens of thousands of innocent citizens en bloc – and back in the City, the banks themselves are habitually mis-selling, sanctions-busting and otherwise behaving far worse than the vast majority of frustrated would-be account holders.

All of which is a preamble to congratulating our Economic Innovator of the Year, ComplyAdvantage, a London-based business which uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analysis on a huge scale to help clients across the financial sector detect all forms of felony. And what a tidal crime wave it has to address.

UK Finance, the trade body for the sector, reckons £1.2 billion was lost to fraud in the UK last year, the bulk of it online through stolen card details – though the same amount again was stopped by banks before the money reached the criminals. The shame, in both senses, is that cyberfraud is such a massive growth market; the consolation is that smart ventures like ComplyAdvantage are attacking it.

More on other Innovator winners on our website and in next week’s issue. But here’s a sad footnote: UK Finance also says that last year, £31 million (in 3,649 cases, to be precise) was lost to ‘romance fraud’ – fake online relationships, in which pressing noses to screens at the first encounter might have been as good a precaution as any.

Degree or no degree?

‘The changing geography of jobs’ is a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies which signposts discouraging trends for students at university – and should perhaps point youngsters still at school to reassess their options. The share of UK workers with a degree has risen (in parallel with the formation and expansion of so many new universities) from 13 per cent in 1993 to 42 per cent last year. But that shift has also brought a huge over-supply of holders of what turn out to be all-but-worthless degrees, no longer guaranteeing better prospects than those of peers who went straight into work from school.

Jobs that actually require a degree, says the IFS, are increasingly concentrated in London. But even in the capital one third of graduates do non-graduate jobs – all those baristas and shop assistants – while in places such as Lincolnshire and Cumbria, fewer than half of graduates find work appropriate to their qualifications, compared with almost two thirds in 1993. And the ‘graduate wage premium’ (how much more grads are likely to earn on average compared with non-grads) has fallen in all regions outside London.

Heaven knows what the advance of AI will have done to these statistics, and the career landscape they encapsulate, in another 30 years’ time. Few believe Elon Musk’s prediction that all human jobs will disappear, but those that remain may divide sharply between the executive and the menial, with ever fewer in the upper stratum. Meanwhile, two interim conclusions stand out from intersecting graph lines of graduate numbers versus graduate jobs.

The first is that much of our bloated university sector is unfit for purpose, keeping itself alive only by churning out degrees in fluffy subjects that afford little or no lifetime benefit to students; though don’t expect this washed-up government or its Labour successor to start radical axe-swinging. The second is that becoming a start-up entrepreneur – whether straight from school, after a practical apprenticeship, or after a three-year ‘uni’ idyll that you always knew would be a fun-filled waste of time – is now for the brightest kids a more promising option than being one of 20 or 100 applicants for every graduate corporate traineeship. So the flipside of the graduate job crunch is that it is generating new cohorts of economic innovators whose ambition is (or should be) not to collect degree certificates that are barely worth framing, but to win Spectator awards.

A city transformed

I’ve just spent a stimulating weekend in Liverpool, staying near the Philharmonic Hall – which stirred a childhood memory from the 1960s of my father bribing a small boy in a dark side-street with half a crown to ‘mind’ our parked car, which of course meant not to vandalise it, while we attended a concert. Though much fine old architecture survives, the city has been reborn since that depressed post-war era and the even darker days of the 1981 Toxteth riots, its economy now driven by visitor attractions, football, expanding universities and events such as this year’s Eurovision, as well as high levels of municipal spending, rather than by any vestige of its former role as a great Atlantic port.

There’s still a debate as to whether more credit for the transformation should go to Michael Heseltine’s post-Toxteth hyper-activity as ‘minister for Merseyside’ or to EU officials who named Liverpool as European Capital of Culture in 2008. Awarded the freedom of the city in 2012, Hezza isn’t entirely forgotten – and observed in a recent Change Makers podcast that Liverpool made a difference to his own future as much as vice versa. How that difference is best made for any post-industrial conurbation – by private-sector developers, city-region mayors or parachuted ministers – is a topic for discussion over a pint at the historic Philharmonic Dining Halls or (the top tip you’ve been waiting for) a long lunch at Bistro Franc in Hanover Street.