[Dave Birch] A number of industry observers in the UK expressed (eg, Kable) some surprise that the government’s estimates for the cost of the proposed national ID card scheme have gone up, despite the fact that the Home Office had announced that it was not going to build a new “gold standard” database but use some other databases (that already exist) and that it was no longer going to capture and store iris biometrics. The previous home secretary, John Reid, had said that this new approach would save money. Anyway, all of this means that the government needs some more ideas on how to recoup the cost of the scheme, especially since charging people thirty quid for the card is not a terribly popular approach. Nor is their plan to charge companies around 60p a time to check details held on the identity database. They hope for up to 770m ‘verifications’ each year. In fact, between the cost of the cards and the charges for verification, the Home Office forecast that the scheme will essentially be “self-financing through fee income” , although I’m sure if that income includes the income from fines (2.5K for not registering and 1K for notifying a change of address). I was wondering this because in the case of another high-profile local scheme, the Transport for London congestion charge, a common criticism of the scheme is that it relies on the income from fines rather than fees (and still has a 10% evasion rate). According to the publicly available figures for 2005, motorists paid £120 million in congestion charges and a further £70 million in penalty charges, but (according to an AA spokesperson)

In many cases these were not deliberate non-payers. They just didn’t understand the scheme and as a result were landed with £100 fines.

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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] The outlook for contactless cards continues to look pretty bright, with the 109 million contactless card users expected in the US by 2011. Some recent figures put 2006 spending on contactless cards at $15 billion (which looks like around $7-8K per card to me, which seems a little high) with the percentage of retailers having contactless payment systems expected to nearly triple within two years, so the transaction volume will continue to climb healthily. I don’t say card volume, of course, because they may not be cards. Our friends at Glenbrook have being doing a survey at their payment boot camps asking people how they would like to pay for small purchases (eg, coffee) given the choice between a contactless card, a keyfob, their mobile phone or their fingerprint. The winner? The mobile phone with 46% of votes, followed by cards without signature (27%), finger print (15%) and fob (12%). I think you’d get an even stronger preference for phones outside the US, frankly.

Technorati Tags: cashless, contactless, mobile

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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] Our good friends at Safaricom in Kenya have allowed us to share some up-to-date (and really rather positive) figures from the launch of the M-PESA scheme that we have been working on there. For those of you not familiar with the service, it’s based on secure text messaging and aimed at the more than 80% of people who are excluded from the formal financial sector there. Apart from transferring money from person to person – a service in demand from urban Kenyans supporting relatives in rural areas – customers of the Safaricom network can also keep up to 50,000 shillings (£370) in a “virtual account” linked to their handset (well, SIM actually).

Technorati Tags: mobile, p2p, remittances

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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] Virtual worlds, digital money and mobile, all in one story! ! It’s all about the Japanese virtual world S! Town, run by Softbank Mobile, which attracted 100,000 subscribers in its first couple of months of operation. In S! Town, subscribers design and dress their avatar and room, using the virtual world’s currency for purchases. Friends share pictures, download music and meet friends in the public plaza. There are community events like treasure hunts, which often have monetary prize incentives that serve to give subscribers more currency to personalize their avatar and digs. That’s what’s great about virtual worlds, everyone’s happy. Well, I say everyone. I mean everyone except the regulators, spoilsports that they are.

Technorati Tags: p2p, regulation, virtual worlds

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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 thinking about my day out at the Forum Oxford conference on Future Technologies, in Oxford. I won’t go over all of the presentations since you can go via Forum Oxford to pick them up (and get involved in the discussion) but they did provide food for thought and I appreciate Ajit and Tomi’s efforts to create a novel kind of cross-media "watering hole" for those of us kindly referred to as "opinon formers" in their introduction.

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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 gave a talk about prepaid cards recently and it was very clear from the questions I got afterwards that they are central to many organisations strategies.  I wasn’t surprised when MasterCard Europe released some new figures estimating that spending on prepaid payment "cards" (my quotes, because by 2010 some of the prepaid transactions will via phones, keyfobs, watches and goodness knows what else) will reach $164 billion in three year’s time.  The research they commissioned shows that the UK will be the biggest single market for prepaid cards and the Russia and Poland will have the highest prepaid penetration (at 13-14%, compared to 8% for Germany).  One of the reasons for the bullish prediction is the increasing use of prepaid cards by governments to pay benefits.  Note that for comparison, the US market is predicted to be $296 billion, Japan $59 billion and the UK $34 billion at the same time (which means it will be the fourth largest market).

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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.