June 2006 - Page 2 of 2 - Tomorrow's Transactions

Two fingers to the passport

Thursday, 15 June 2006 by John.Elliott Leave a Comment

I am very excited: something very special happened the other day.

My front door bell rang, I bounded down two floors of stairs to get there in time to find a delivery man from SMS (Secure Mail Services that IPS uses to deliver passports). Having signed, I took delivery of my seven-year-old son’s replacement passport.

Back upstairs I opened the envelope to discover that he has been issued with a biometric passport, complete with smart chip and antenna embedded in a page at the back. When we get back from Turkey, I’ll take it straight to our lab in Guildford for testing. Last time I did something like this, I found something surprising

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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 blog empire expands

Thursday, 15 June 2006 by Dave Birch Leave a Comment

If you enjoy the approach of this blog, we hope you’ll be equally enthusiastic about the digital identity blog that we have just started over here.

Please remember to bookmark it and visit regularly.

The Elephant in the room

Tuesday, 13 June 2006 by Dave Birch 1 Comment

[Dave Birch] Off to the British Bankers’ Association seminar on Identity Fraud to hear an "Update on Identity Cards" by Stephen Harrison, Director of Policy, UK Passport Services and Identity Cards programme. Having promised myself that I wouldn’t bore readers of the new Digital Identity Blog with yet more about the UK ID card, the truth is that for many businesses and other organisations trying to develop identity management policies, the ID card is the elephant in the room. Now, clearly, my clients (eg, card issuers) are potential big users of ID cards so they need to know exactly how it is all going to work for them so that they can start planning. Since, according to Mr. Harrison, the government will start issuing them in only three years time, they ought to be part of short- to medium-term strategies now. So, for example, what should a bank put into its branch strategy because of the ID card?

Technorati Tags: banking

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No more fraud

Monday, 12 June 2006 by Dave Birch 4 Comments

[Dave Birch] I’ve got a very simple, and absolutely foolproof, plan to reduce payment card fraud (much in the news recentlyk) to zero. It’s based on the observation that there are two ways to cut crime: cut the number of crimes or cut the number of offences. The latter means that society’s focus is to concentrate on policing: to try and both prevent crimes from occurring and to improve the detection rate should crimes still occur. The former means society’s focus is to reduce the number of types of crime. Maybe the latter deserves to be explored further in the context of credit card fraud.

Technorati Tags: banking, credit cards, debit cards

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Fair trade

Friday, 2 June 2006 by Dave Birch 3 Comments

[Dave Birch] I’ve been thinking some more about the competition between cash and electronic payments. Leo Van Hove from the Free University of Brussels has been a good friend of the Digital Money Forum for many years. He made a presentation at the 7th Forum talking about the state of the e-purse in Europe, and made the point that in many ways the purse faces unfair competition from cash, because cash is cross-subsidised. If customers who wanted to use cash were made to pay the full price for it (setting aside the obvious social concern that the poor would see their transaction costs rise), then the electronic alternatives would become more attractive.

Technorati Tags: business, cash, costs, payments

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