Because that’s where the money is

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[Dave Birch] The electronification, virtualising and dematerialising of money means the electronification, virtualising and dematerialising of crime, because (naturally) criminals go where the money is.

FBI officials say a mix of banking Trojans and phishing attacks has plagued victims – mainly public institutions and small and midsize businesses – to the tune of $100 million in attempted losses as of October.

[From FBI: Online Banking Attacks Reach $100 Million Mark]

Note, by way of comparison, that about $60m was stolen in physical bank robberies throughout the USA in the whole of 2008. How stupid do you have to be to walk into a bank with a gun when you could just stay at home and send out some e-mails? We must find a way to accelerate the transition to e-payments and at the same time make e-money more crime-resistant than cash.

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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.

Air side

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[Dave Birch] The whole business of air travel is a laboratory for experimenting at the boundary between public and private identities, where national and international agreements interact with corporate alliances, outsourcing and value chains to produce a complex environment that needs and benefits from change. Speaking as a frequent traveller, and happy near-weekly user of Heathrow’s Terminal 5, it seems to me that air travel has got considerably quicker, more efficient and simpler in the last couple of years. I print my boarding pass out at home, jump in a cab or on the train, nip through T5 to the lounge and then on to the plane — the only hold-up in the whole process is the queue for security on the way out (sometimes this can be 10-15 minutes even at T5) and the queue for passport control on the way in.

However, the need to print a physical boarding pass, even using 2D barcodes rather than a magnetic stripe, and the lack of an efficient bag drop system means that despite the universal electronic ticket for air travel, more than two-thirds of passengers still went to a check-in desk. Where to look for the next improvement? Well, I’m sure like most people I think that the key technology that will change this is the mobile phone. If the mobile phone allows you to check in and obtain a boarding pass, and a kiosk at the airport allows you to self-tag (clearly there are some security issues around this) then the flow through airports would increase significantly and the costs would reduce accordingly.

In fact I saw a presentation for one of the companies that supplies infrastructure to airports recently an they were talking about their experiences with the mBCBP (mobile bar code boarding pass) — they said that “we only care about Blackberry, iPhone and high-end smartphones”, which means we can assume big, clear screens — but still the current 2D barcode solutions don’t carry enough data for the airlines to store more than three legs plus frequent-flier and other data.

So why am I looking at this space? One of the biggest players in the industry, IER, is advocating the “pass & fly” sticker solution and I saw them present on the Air New Zealand and Air France case studies which, I have to say, was rather impressive.

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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.

Viking expedition

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[Dave Birch] I was in Copenhagen recently, so naturally I went along to the national museum to see their notes and coins exhibition (galleries 141 to 146, if you’re interested). It was really good, and I particularly enjoyed the display of Swedish copper money from the 17th century. Sweden had lots of copper, so that’s what it used for coins. But copper isn’t worth very much, so the coins were huge — the one thaler “coin” was a block of copper weighing a couple of kilograms.

While pottering around between the 10th century Islamic coins found in Viking treasure hoards, the short-lived Norwegian privately-issued banknotes that preceeded Denmark’s first paper currency and the English gold nobles from the time of Henry II, I happened across some other long-forgotten artefacts from the story of the evolution of the means of exchange in the world’s oldest kingdom…

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Danmont cards! I have to admit to a moment of melancholy while gazing at the cards, notes and coins. Some of them were ugly, some of them were beautiful, and all of them tell a story. Such as, for example, you’ve been cheated.

A one euro coin has turned up in Spain bearing the face of cartoon couch potato Homer Simpson instead of that of the country’s king

[From Spanish shopkeeper finds Homer Simpson euro | U.S. | Reuters]

So when cash disappears, and there are no more portraits of heroic characters or Latin inscriptions, what will take over the narrative? Facebook, I suppose. But wiping away the tears, I remembered that there are a great many people around the world who can’t wait to replace coins with mobile phones. The truth is, coins today are as much hassle as the Swedish copper currency from the days of the Carl Gustav wars.

Mr. Zhang of Shenyang carried two bags of coins to a bank outlet in the city, having accumulated 37,000 coins, more than 600 yuan, over the past decade. According to the rules of the bank, there is a one-yuan service fee for counting every 50 coins. If he were to hand the money over to the bank, the service fee would amount to more than the total value of his 37,000 coins… Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing banks have charged counting fees since 2005… the most affected were bus companies. In order to save counting fees, the Shenyang Bus Company handed out change to its employees as their wages.

[From China sees change scarcity -- china.org.cn]

Enough is enough.

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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.

Close enough for jazz

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[Dave Birch] I had a typical fascinating and productive discussion with Hazel Lacohee and Piotr Cofta when we last got together. We were kicking around some ideas for finding practical ways to improve privacy, security and other good stuff while simultaneously worrying about the government's approach to the interweb, broadband and ID cards. With the right combination of technology and vision we can take an entirely different view of the "identity problem" and how to solve it. In a decentralised fashion we can see identity develop as an emergent property of trust networks, shaped by evolution to be fit for purpose or, as Piotr Cofta puts it, "good enough identity". Good enough identity (GEI). I love it.

I'm certain that there is merit in this approach. There is a real difference between between trying to create a kind of "gold standard" identity that delivers the highest possible levels of authentication and identification in all circumstances and trying to create an identity that is useful (defined by: reduces total transaction costs and, in my world, aligns social costs with private costs). Therefore, a utilitarian approach of trying to do something, anything to make the identity situation improve for individuals and organisations, we might be better off starting with some simple building blocks and building up rather than by starting with a national ID card (I mean, a 21st-century national ID card of the psychic ID kind, not electronic cardboard) and driving that down. Go from the personal to the enterprise, from the enterprise to government.

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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.

Biometrics 200n

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[Dave Birch] I actually rather enjoyed my day out at Biometrics 2009 because it was an opportunity to catch up with old friends and see what the buzz is. Yes, you can have LinkedIn and Twitter, but there’s still no substitute for hanging out in the coffee area at a big conference. Some of the content was, though, somewhat reminiscent of Biometrics 2008, 7, 6… we’re still not at a mass market, and part of the reason is that no-one seems to know what that mass market is. Is it fingerprint scanners in every laptop? I doubt it. Is it logging in to your bank using voice authentication? Maybe. Is it using your National ID Card to get served in a pub? Doesn’t look like it at the moment.

Personally, based on a couple of sessions I sat in on, I thought there was some confusion about the proposition — not from everyone — and I suspect that at least part of the problem is that the major integrators come from the government and defence space, so their approach to the market and their product set reflects that. If you’ve made a living selling large-scale automatic fingerprint identification systems to law enforcement agencies, then it may be difficult to make the transition to selling improved authentication to banks. And there’s no reason to suspect that that improved authentication will be achieved using the same technologies anyway.

I happened to be sitting next to Forum friend Maxine Most from Acuity Inc, one of the world’s leading analysts of the international biometrics market, and she made a key point early on in the day: the mass market is about mobile phones, not PCs. This was a central element of my presentation on biometrics in the event space and was further amplified by the Precise Biometrics presentation advocating match-on-SIM going forwards. This, as an aside, suggests to me that there is a premium on biometric technologies that synergise with mobile phones — we’re talking about the mass commercial market here, not law enforcement and national security — so that really means voice recognition and voice authentication (I don’t buy the fingerprint-scanner-in-handset model in the mass market). A couple of people remarked that these biometrics didn’t seem to be getting much coverage compared to fingerprints, iris and the like, which I imagine is also a reflection on the government and law enforcement focus of the show.

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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.