Phone phishing

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[Dave Birch] There’s been much comment on this week’s news (well, news for people like us) that PayPal is to launch a mobile payments service. Essentially, customers will pay for something by sending a text containing a product code (from a web site or wherever). They get back an IVR call confirming the transaction and asking them to enter a PIN. The payment is then taken from their PayPal account. This is yet another confirmation that mobile payments is one of the key digital money topics for 2006.

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

End the cash menace now!

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[Dave Birch] Surely, the e-payments industry should adopt the same approach as other more mature industries, such as Hollywood: don’t innovate, legislate! But how to ban the competition? We need to get the tabloids on our side. The hopeless heisters have given me an idea. If we remind the general public that cash is the reason for most armed robberies, that most drug deals take place in cash, that cash can carry Bird flu and that terrorists can use cash to avoid being traced, then they would be agitating for it to be banned! Let’s start a campaign in the Daily Express and the News of the World: End the cash menace now!

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

The whole real/virtual thing is a bit fuzzy

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[Dave Birch] The whole world of really virtual money continues to fascinate. One thing fascinates me in particular: the relationship between virtual currency, free trade and prosperity. To be more specific: in some low labour-cost countries, such as China, people are paid to play games such as World of Warcraft and engage in the mundane and repetitive tasks, such as mining virtual gold in a virtual gold mine. They then exchange this virtual gold for real money (the traders sell the virtual gold on to people like me who are richer but time poor and can’t be bothered to play the game in this way).

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

Gone West

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At the end of January, Western Union closed down their telegraph business. But its most important value-added network service, money transfers, continues. Over the course of the technology lifecycle, it earned far more more than the basic service ever did. Shouldn’t mobile operators spend their time trying to make money transfer work rather than messing around with music downloads?

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

Time to make sure the banks serve the poor

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We – that is the New Economics Foundation – believe there is now clear evidence that the UK‘s biggest banks are cherry picking customers for premium accounts and failing to meet the needs of the poorest. That means the poor pay more for everyday services, and have to turn to loan sharks for credit.

 

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

Divided by a common standard

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No-one (at least no-one reading this blog) can have failed to have noticed the story that’s been running in US on the apparently industrial scale card-skimming that’s been going on there. It’s so bad that Citibank has blocked ATM withdrawals from some MasterCard accounts after a series of fraudulent cash withdrawals in the UK, Russia and Canada. Wells Fargo, similarly, blocked ATM withdrawals in the UK. Gartner say that this is the “largest PIN theft to date”. While it’s difficult to determine exactly what has gone wrong, the general opinion seems to be that it is not bank systems but third-party systems (a processor or a retailer) that have been compromised (yet again), enabling criminals to manufacture counterfeit cards on an large scale and then distribute them for use at ATMs.

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

Prepaid and contactless

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MasterCard made a couple of interesting presentations to the Smart Card Club in London yesterday.   Bruno Carpreau was explaining the OneSmart MasterCard Paypass product.  This combines EMV with a contactless interface: the cards will work at any PayPass terminal in the US (operating in magnetic stripe mode) as well as any EMV terminal elsewhere (they also have magnetic stripes on for backward compatibility).  Chris Reddish was explaining the range of MasterCard prepaid products and was generally very positive about the European prepaid market, predicting it to be around 80-85 billion euros in 2008.   I gave a bullish talk on the combination of contactless and prepaid at the same event.

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

Direct debit top up

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Digital Payments, the company set up by Voca, Retail Decisions and Mi-pay, has just signed its first customer for direct debit funded mobile top-ups – Carphone Warehouse.

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

1886 and all that

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I’m very interested in the history of the card business, because I can’t help but feel that an understanding of how it got to where it is should provide some insight into where it is going next, so I am always on the lookout for old references to non-cash retail payments. In particular, I’m always curious about the first reference to the credit card in literature. The oldest I’ve found so far is in a long-forgotten text from 1886 called “Looking Backward, 2000-1887” by one Edward Bellamy. I picked up a 1947 edition from the Amazon marketplace, which suggests it must have been reprinted a few times. Indeed, the dust jacket claims it to be one of the best selling utopian fantasies of all time.

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.