If you must use cash

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[Dave Birch] Then you’ll first want to check out the top 10 places to hide it around the house.  But for how much longer will you be doing this?  There are people out there who want to create an economy free of paper money and coins.  The revolution (Money 3.0?) has already started.  Millions of consumers rolling through tollbooths without stopping, their in-car transponders beaming information to an RFID (radio frequency identification) reader and triggering a process by which tolls are transferred from a credit card or bank account to the highway authority.  Millions more use SpeedPass devices to pay for gasoline, simply waving a key fob in front of a reader built into a gas pump, paying for gas without every opening their wallets.  Millins more have started to use contactless payment cards for small purchases.  The technology is now here, but how long will the cultural change take?  Tim Attinger, SVP Product Innovation and Development for Visa USA (who describes himself as being in charge of ridding the America of cash and cheques) says that the next frontier is to delete even the plastic from "plastic".  He says "I dream of a day when kids on the corner selling lemonade will take Visa payments".

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Where you don’t need identity, don’t use it

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[Dave Birch] Surely a guiding principle of an identity management system should be that it only uses identity when it is absolutely necessary to the transaction at hand — a rather obvious way to cut down on identity abuse and misuse is to stop using identity.  The overwhelming majority of day-to-day transactions do not require identity at all: they are about entitlement.  There are two rather obvious examples of this, that ought to be some kind of litmus test for identity schemes: proof of age and retail payment.
The grocer, the butcher, a cabinet maker and several other members of the town’s Mennonite community are planning to move to Arkansas over a Missouri requirement that all drivers be photographed if they want a license.
The Mennonites — a plain-living sect whose members are similar to the Amish, but usually more worldly — say the 2004 law conflicts with the Biblical prohibition against the making of “graven images.”The grocer, the butcher, a cabinet maker and several other members of the town’s Mennonite community are planning to move to Arkansas over a Missouri requirement that all drivers be photographed if they want a license.
The Mennonites — a plain-living sect whose members are similar to the Amish, but usually more worldly — say the 2004 law conflicts with the Biblical prohibition against the making of “graven images.”

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Negative added value

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[Dave Birch] Cash really is a waste of money.  In the U.S.A., the government has been losing money of every new copper coin, as the costs of producing a one cent coin is about 1.4 cents.  Now, because of the cost of nickel, the five cent coin now costs 5.73 cents.  This makes minting coins an astonishingly bad business: it may well be unique in the amount of value destroyed in the production process.  I wonder if there’s a business school course somewhere about managing businesses with negative added value: the final product is actually worth less than it’s raw materials.

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Video fun

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[Dave Birch] The Royal Academy of Engineering Report that we’ve discussed before has attracted some kind comments, including those from security guru Bruce Schneier.

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Credit, debit, prepaid

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[Dave Birch] I often find myself using "credit card" as a generic term for payment card.  It’s a reflection of my age, I suppose, and a deep-seated response to the first payment card I ever had: a Barclaycard that I rather unwisely obtained as a student.  But credit cards are in retreat online and shunned elsewhere, mostly in favor of debit cards.  Visa says that about 55% of its e-commerce transactions are now debit cards rather than credit cards.  This is more than double the proportion of just two or three years ago!  Now, I don’t get this.  I use my credit card for absolutely everything, but clearly I’m in the minority.  In the U.S., debit card transactions grew nearly a fifth last year issuers expect continued strong growth this year.  Bizarrely (to Europeans), signature debit grew 20%, PIN debit only 16% and active cardholders performed about 11 signature debit transactions and 5 PIN debit transactions.  Anyway, I was wondering if in a decade or so, we might be seeing debit cards becoming the minority as prepaid products come to dominate globally.Visa debit card. “The platform is designed to instantly send (SMS) text alerts to the FaithFone handset anytime the accountholders VISA Debit card is used for purchases.Visa debit card. “The platform is designed to instantly send (SMS) text alerts to the FaithFone handset anytime the accountholders VISA Debit card is used for purchases.

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Names are confusing in the UK

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[Dave Birch] I was at a conference today and one of the speakers was Nick Sex of Alpheus — yes, it’s his real name.  It must cause havoc with their spam filter, but anyway.  It set me thinking about how odd names are as identifiers, and how he had a much better name than me.  Luckily, if I do decide to change my name to Dave Sex, I can do it using a service such as Fast Deed Poll, which allows me to change my name quickly and easily.  As the web site says, "you can obtain a official change of name Deed Poll Document from us INSTANTLY just for £3.50".  Now that’s service.

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ID theft, again

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[Dave Birch] Well, depending on which particular definition of "identity" and "theft" you choose, the problem grows.  In the US, 15 million Americans were victimized in just a 12-month period.  The amount of money that is being stolen from them is on the rise, as well, more than doubling between 2005 and 2006, Gartner analysts report in a study. And more of what they’re losing is staying lost: people managed to recover 87 percent of what was stolen from them back in 2005, but in 2006 that number dropped to 61 percent.  And here’s a surprise from the UK: most identity fraud appears to take place in and around London with its concentration of wealthy people (eg, not me) and "upmarket" addresses.  So, basically, the fraudsters are targeting rich people who bank online.

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I wonder if mobile phones will really catch on?

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[Dave Birch] Yet mobile money launches.  KushCash is one, another is AT&T.  They are planning a a “single front door” format for full service mobile banking.  Apparently this means that banking will work the same way as e-mail and instant-messaging services, where AT&T provides a user interface that offers access to a number of different Internet service providers.  So instead of a number of applications from different banks having to be tested, configured and so on, there will just be one AT&T banking application and it can connect to multiple banks.  An AT&T person said that although banks might be reluctant to put their brand and services up next to those of competitors, the single interface would help prevent market fragmentation.  I’m still not sure if I would want to use this kind of application, but then I’m probablynot the target market because I’m happy banking on the web.  What’s important is s, as Hannes van Rensburg says, that mobile banking is enabling people who never had access to electronic banking before.  Internet banking enabled people to access their banking electronically only if they had been banked before, whereas mobile banking is leading to a revolution where people are being banked who never had a banking relationship in the past. This is largely because of the utility and functionality that is now being made available to people with cell-phones (which is much more than people with access to the Internet)However, the biggest difference is the access that mobile banking have enabled especially to people that never had access to electronic banking before. Internet banking enabled people to access their banking electronically only if they had been banked before, whereas mobile banking is leading to a revolution where people are being banked who never had a banking relationship in the past.

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Sharing with whom?

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[Dave Birch] There’s a thought-provoking piece on data sharing over at Ideal Government.  They refer to the "Transformational Government" agenda that is based on using shared data to present services in a personalised way.  The example given is online car tax just uses the necessary: MoT, DVLA, insurance and credit card for identification – with clear citizen satisfaction and support.  But I wonder about this.  If we collect data together in order to share it, then we are building in vulnerabilities.  If we’re going to have workable national identity management scheme, then we have to tackle this problem head on and come up with a workable solution that balances privacy and sharing, not put faith a vague hope that it will be alright on the night.

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Kill your television

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[Dave Birch] Television is so 1930. The new era of video is here. Since all the kids are talking about YouTube, I’ve created an account there so that we can put up the odd video here and there in connection with both the Digital Money Forum and the Digital Identity Forum. Again, like the podcasts, we’re talking about short, hopefully informative packages here rather than the next Citizen Kane and feedback is always appreciated.

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