e-Dictum meum pactum

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[Dave Birch] There’s a story about identity in The Economist magazine that I read on the plane to Washington ("My bow is my bond", p.98, 26th April 2008) that connects directly with something I’m working on for a client at the moment. Naturally, neither the client or the assignment will be discussed here, except to note that I’ve been playing around with some ideas on value-adding identity services for the mass market. I’d also recently received an e-mail from an august body, which won’t be discussed here either, asking if I’d like to provide (for free!) some ideas on how to get private companies to use the U.K. identity card: I ignored the request, of course, but I did jot down a few notes. For both of these reasons, the story caught my eye.

The story concerns a fraud against Lehman Brothers in Japan. They lent a Japanese company $350 million, The load was guaranteed by a well-established Japanese trading house. Bankers from Lehman met an executvie from the trading house — at the trading house’s office — to sign the contract. When the firm in question defaulted, Lehman went to the trading house to get their money, but the trading house claimed no knowledge of the deal. The executive had been an imposter and the contract was fake. When someone gives you their business card, you assume that it is true (by custom and practice — you don’t explicitly validate it) and when they put a letterhead in front of you, you take it to be real. Oops.

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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.

A few coppers

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[Dave Birch] There’s no doubt that “green” is a business pressure now. There are plenty of ways in which payments could use new technology more effectively to deliver more environmentally-friendly products: there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit around the elimination of paper that’s a “win win”, as they say.

The good news about the elimination of paper in our paper intensive industry is that any move to reduce the amount of paper in a customer’s relationship improves the profitability of that account for the bank.

[From Banking on Customers: Green is good…as far as it goes]

I’m all favour of this kind of thinking, but I also always really appreciate a spurious green veneer on a press release: it shows deference to zeitgeist as well a spin skills on show. Very modern. A particularly impressive case in point is in Business Week. In a story called “How to turn pennies green“, which I imagine is based on a press release from Coinstar (a company I have always liked, and still do, not that it matters), we are reminded that mining copper uses lots of power and water. What do you make out of copper? Well, coins for one thing. So, Coinstar estimate that there are 150 billion “unused” coins around in the U.S. at present, and they add up to about $90 per household. They reckon that if people were to take just 10% of these coins down to their local supermarket and chuck them in the Coinstar machine then they would generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for Coinstar but also, more importantly, stop the U.S. Mint from wasting loads of money (the Mint loses money on every coin it makes, remember: nickels now cost 7.7. cents each) and reduce the demand for copper thus saving the energy used by 4m light bulbs. No sure if the logic stands up to really detailed scrutiny, but it’s a fun story anyway.

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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.