[Dave Birch] This was an absolutely inevitable development. We spend a lot of time thinking about the identity of people, but the identities of animals (and things) are just as important to the future economy (and society).  Now that someone appears to have developed magnetic ink tattoos that can be read with a RFID reader, there’s another building block in place for doing this.  There’s also more pressure than ever to have some sensible and reasoned debate about the models for the deployment and use of such technology.

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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.

[Dave Birch] Biometrics expert Jim Wayman, who consults for the Australian, US and British governments, says that mobile phones and credit cards, not biometrics, are the main enemies for workers worried about geoslavery.  What an excellent word: I wonder if he invented it.  Jim goes on to say that "There may be large forces at work in Western society wishing to enslave the workforce. I want to acknowledge that fear, but [a biometric time/attendance system] is not part of this".  He says monitoring computer and phone usage are the "tools by which an employer would seek to enslave the workforce – it would not be done through biometrics".

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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.

[Dave Birch] I was in a meeting that touched on loyalty and payments today.  It reminded me that the Wise Marketer had a story about payments and loyalty report that readers might find interesting.  The report, called Making Loyalty Pay: The Relationship Between Rewards and Payments, talks about new models for loyalty with their roots in the web, mobile, biometrics and other technologies. It’s very positive about them, saying that they have the potential to boost revenues for merchants, technology providers and payment providers alike, while also minimising the issuer payment revenue cannibalisation. Judging from the priorities of some of our clients, I would say that this bullish perspective is probably correct. As Aneace often points out, while banks (in particular) have yet to really take advantage of the migration to chip, the retailers are looking to banks to deliver more value and better loyalty and rewards platforms seems to be a reasonable way to create that value.  Contactless, for example, should mean that customers are using cards in places where they used to use cash and so loyalty schemes had to be often-forgotten bits of cardboard and the like.  With the chip, they can be automated.

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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.

[Dave Birch] Well, I don’t want to get caught up in "angels on heads of PINs" debates, but something popped up in a conversation recently: when should we call a scheme "e-cash" and when should we call it "e-money" and why do we lump both of them together as "digital money".  How this for a distinction: when you have an electronic payment instrument that you can use to pay a merchant, then that’s "e-money", but when you have an electronic payment instrument that can be used to pay another person, then that’s "e-cash".  And both of them together are "digital money".

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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.

[Dave Birch] At the APACS briefing back in December, arranged through Vendorcom, there was an announcement about the roll-out of contactless payment cards in the UK. The deployment of terminals will begin in south east London in September 2007, and I thought it might be mildly useful to post a quick update on the roll-out including information and highlight one or two areas that have been touched on in recent posts, where I think some more work may be required by the industry in 2007 to make sure everything goes smoothly.

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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.

[Dave Birch] At the RSA conference, Forum friend Toby Stevens from EPG was on a panel asking "Does Real ID really work?".  A quick primer: The US Real ID initiative aims to establishes a de facto national ID by establishing national standards for state driver’s licenses and ID cards. It mandates that states maintain accessible databases of documents used to establish identity but makes no provision for securing this data or controlling how data on the card is used.  So never mind "will it work", perhaps a better question is "will it be implemented".

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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.

[Dave Birch] When Ian Grigg was talking about Skype on his always thought-provoking Financial Cryptography site it rang a few bells with me. He says (and I agree entirely) that the big picture is that integrated chat and payments will be immense. As he puts it, if not the next killer application (more on this in a moment), certainly the next killer integration. Skype isn’t yet making the kind of money necessary to justify its price tag and few of the oft-hyped “synergies” have materialized, but the further integration of Skype and PayPal could boost the latter’s transfer volume. It isn’t hard to see how the integration will succeed — let’s see, “send file”, nope, “send money”, ok here’s the $20 I owe you — which is why Skype was always going to integrate well with PayPal to make it easy for Skype users to pay anyone on their contact list. Soon.

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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.