Yet another identity initiative

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[Dave Birch] The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is backing a new initiative on online identity management.  The ITU Focus Group on Identity Management aims to bring "global harmony to identity management" through a technology and platform-independent solution because it believes the use of multiple usernames and passwords is a boon for hacking, identity theft and other forms of cyber crime.  I couldn’t agree more.  How this is to be achieved, though, is another matter.  It’s not clear to me how this initiative differs from all of the other initiatives but more effort is always welcome.  The ITU initiative says that it will bring together key players in identity management including developers, software vendors, standards forums, manufacturers, telecom firms and academia.  They aim to promote interoperability among systems by providing an open mechanism based on a ‘trust-metric’ system that will allow different identity management solutions to communicate.  I’m looking forward to learning more, starting by contributing to their wiki if I can.

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Global money transfer

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[Dave Birch] Western Union has $4.5 billion in revenue last year.  They have a big share of the remittance market and there are plenty of other people looking at that number with some envy.  One particular group of people looking at that market are mobile operators, who (via the GSM Association, which represents more than 700 mobile phone operators in more than 200 territories and countries) recently got together with MasterCard to pilot a global money transfer service that will use mobile phone technology to reach consumers who have no access to traditional banking services (ie, almost everyone in the entire world).  Their vision is that users will be able to transfer money almost instantaneously between participating banks and various card payment products, such as MasterCard’s pre-pay cards, via a mobile phone.

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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.

My identity? Blue till I die

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[Dave Birch] The pride of association football, Manchester City Football Club, are also the pride of the smart card world.  The first football club in Britain to have an all-smart card (ie, no paper tickets) stadium, they have been blazing a trail in the use of NFC phones for entitlement and access control.  City equipped 30 fans at the beginning of the season with Nokia 3220 NFC phones to store ticket information and open stadium turnstiles when held against a contactless reader.

‘The trial proved the technology works and the feedback from fans of all ages has been positive,’ said Duncan Martin, head of retail at Manchester City (who described the contactless access scheme to the fifth annual Digital Identity Forum) says ‘We must now wait on the development of mobile phones equipped to accept NFC.’  Quite, but it won’t be too long.  More importantly, he goes on to say that ‘we believe that eventually more mobile phones will be used to gain entry to the stadium than smartcards.’  Duncan is a very sensible guy, so if he says that, I take him seriously.  It seems to me that the kind of evolution we are seeing here — from paper, to contactless, to NFC — will be replicated across many sectors, with the obvious implication that anyone designing an identity, entitlement or access card scheme today must be designing it with the roadmap to mobile in mind.

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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.

Well, is this the year of biometrics?

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[Dave Birch] Some people think that, much as every year was the year of the smart card, this is finally the year of biometrics.  "This really is the year of biometrics," Walter Hamilton, chairman of the International Biometric Industry Association.  In banking, it may well be.

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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.

Me and Britney

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[Dave Birch] I loved my Britney Spears card.  Younger readers may not remember the time when Ms. Spears was the biggest pop star in the world and, astonishing as it may seem, her fan club launched a smart card kit.  Fearing that I would end up on some police database, I bullied my sister-in-law into joining the fan club on my behalf and ordering one for me.  That’s how dull my life was: I wasn’t interested in Ms. Spears big hits, I wanted the card reader.  The kits, which had been developed by Internet PLC, a U.K.-based company.  The company developed the SmartFlash content sold the kits via the web and at her concerts.  The Britney smart card provided access to a secure web site with video clips, e-cards to mail to friends and a preview of her upcoming video game. They sold more than 25,000 kits at $29.95 before they were discontinued.  But they worked.

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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 big 1-0

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[Dave Birch] Well, the tenth Digital Money Forum turned out to be a big, big success.  The feedback that we received was unbelievable: not only did we all get some new ideas and meet new people, but we had a lot of fun doing it, what with the guided tours of the historic Royal palace of the Tower of London and the Monopoly electronic banking charity tournament.  The presentations from the Forum are now available for downloading.

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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.

Balancing news and scare stories

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[Dave Birch] The Royal Academy of Engineering Report on Dilemmas of Privacy and Surveillance was released last week [PDF}.  As I've mentioned before, I was a member of the working group and helped to prepare the sections on the technology roadmap.  The report makes a number of sensible recommendations -- that would be entirely familiar to readers of this blog -- about balancing privacy and security in the real world.  What was fascinating to me was the way that it was reported.  Because I spend a substantial fraction of my working day thinking about identity, authentication, privacy and security on behalf of customers, I suppose I don't really think too much about how the issues seem to the general public or non-specialists (eg, journalists).  They tended to either pick out one line from the entire report and the construct a somewhat sensationalist (and technically confused) "scare" story from it -- about smart bombs, for example, imagining terrorists crafting bombs that use the biometric data stored on passports to target specific nationalities (without explaining how exactly the biometric data reveals your nationality -- or perhaps some nationalities don't have fingerprints?) -- or focus on the more tangible aspects of surveillance (which, in the UK, is CCTV) missing the bigger picture.  But the coverage has been extensive (it even made The Sun), which is what the report was hoping to achieve.

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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.

Virtually legal

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[Dave Birch] Our good friends over at e-commerce law & policy, a sister publication to the reasonably-priced yet indispensable e-finance & payments law & policy, are organising a special briefing on virtual worlds at Field Fisher Waterhouse in London on 18th April. I’m sorry I won’t be able to be there because I’m teaching at Visa’s Bank Card Business School: please contact Kay Ma at e-comlaw to book a place.

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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.