[Dave Birch] As� Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) observed*, “it is the business of the future to be dangerous”. It’s interesting, and says something about human nature I’m sure, that discussions about electronic payments and electronic identity management often drift toward the negative as we begin to imagine the horrors that await. Crime is exciting and interesting and payments are not, so there’s a natural media focus on this dark side. Which is why I wrote about assassination markets for FT Alphaville. Why have these dark side markets surfaced again? Well, it’s because of the resurgence of interest in electronic money attendant on the Bitcoin phenomenon. Oh, and because a chap called Kuwabatake Sanjuro has set one up.

Here’s how an assassination market works. Someone runs a public book on the anticipated death dates of public figures. If I hate a particular pop star or politician, I place a bet on when they will die. When the person dies, whoever had the closest guess wins all of the money, less a cut for the house. Let’s say I bet £5 that a particular TV personality is going to die on April Fool’s Day 2014. Other people really hate this personality too and they put down bets as well. The more hated the person is, the most bets there will be.

April Fool’s Day comes around. There’s a million quid bet on this particularly personality. I pay a hit man £500K to murder the personality. Hurrah! I’ve won the bet, so I get the million quid and give half to the hit man. I don’t have to prove that I was responsible for the assassination to get the money: I’m just the lucky winner. If someone else had bet 31st March and murdered the television personality themselves the day before, then I wouldn’t get the payoff but it would only have cost me a fiver and that would have been a fiver spent in a good cause. You can see how the idea plays to, and exploits, our base human nature.

This is actually a rather old idea and, as I mentioned in the FT, the first name it brings to my mind is that of Jim Bell, whose 1995 essay on “assassination politics” was brought the concept to the mass market although, as mentioned below, he wasn’t the first person to write about it. Will it work with the current technology? I wouldn’t have thought so. Bitcoin is a poor choice of payment mechanism for an assassination market that has to have unconditional anonymity to work properly. The placing of the bets, and the collection of the winnings, must be untraceable. Completely untraceable.

But contrary to conventional wisdom, Bitcoin is not anonymous.

[From Unlike Liberty Reserve, Bitcoin Is Not Anonymous — Yet – NYTimes.com]

So if you obtain your ransom in Bitcoin the trail of breadcrumbs will sooner or later lead back to you…

Of all the millions of dollars of purloined bitcoin that’s floating around out there, not one Satoshi of it has been spent. That’s because while most other stolen property becomes relatively indistinguishable from its legitimate brethren, everybody knows the identity of this particular stolen wealth, and can track it until the end of time.

[From Let’s Cut Through the Bitcoin Hype: A Hacker-Entrepreneur’s Take | Wired Opinion | Wired.com]

And there are people who examine these trails in detail and this examination will get more automated and better informed in time. So you can’t spend stolen bitcoins. But in any case who says there were stolen? How do we know that the exchange operator who says that a hacker transferred out all of their bitcoins didn’t do it themselves? Who decides whether a particular bitcoin is stolen or not? And do people who have accepted bitcoins that are subsequently ruled to be stolen out of pocket? (I hate to spoil the libertarian party, but Visa and MasterCard have tens of thousands of pages of rules to deal with all of this stuff for a reason, which is that consumers, regulators, merchants and other stakeholders all want it).

When it comes down to it, I don’t think pop stars or politicians should be too worried about Kuwabatake Sanjuro’s market. For all I know, Kuwabatake Sanjuro is actually the NSA and even now they are collecting the IP addresses of lunatics who want to murder public officials. In fact, that’s a great idea for TV series!  I had a similar idea after last year’s Consult Hyperion Tomorrow’s Transactions Future of Money art competition. One of the ideas was for crowdsourced crime, which was in time taken over by corporate interests. This was selected as the winner by the panel of payment industry judges and I thought that it was a great idea for my William Gibson-style movie blockbuster (I must remember to mention it to Heather Schlegel when I next see her). It was a thought-provoking idea (which is the point of the competition) and well-presented, as you can see for yourself if you go to the web site, but as Wendy Grossman pointed out at the time, the “cypherpunks” version of this meme dates back to Tim May’s 1994 “Cyphernomicon” and the row about anonymous money has been going on ever since.

The proponents of cash argue that if us e-money people are to mount a serious effort to eradicate physical money then we must replicate anonymity as it is a key property of cash. I couldn’t disagree more. Us e-money people are building something better than cash.

* I know about this because of Hawkwind, not because I am literate.

These are personal opinions and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinions of�
Consult Hyperion or any of its clients or suppliers

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 invited to give a talk at the Crossing Borders International Technology Festival 2013 so I put together a few slides about trends in the European retail payments marketplace, but as my talk on the Future of Money at the Meaning Conference in Brighton had gone so well, at the last minute I decided to give a cut down version of that talk instead. It seemed to go OK, but my point about the use of cash in a modern economy seem to have particular resonance with the Dutch audience and several people spoke to me about that particular topic during the break.

One guy came up to me and told that he owned fourteen properties in the Netherlands, some houses and some apartments, and that he always paid his builders in cash, He said that the “white price” for building work in the Netherlands is approach twice the “black price” because the builders use cash not only to evade VAT but also to pay their staff and suppliers in cash, thus avoiding income tax and corporate taxes as well. I joked with him saying that 200 and 500 euro notes were never used for legitimate transactions and he replied, entirely seriously, that he had never used a 100 euro note in a legitimate transaction either!

This point came back to me yesterday when I saw Twitter comment about the Senate hearing on Bitcoin. As someone remarked, all of the complaints about Bitcoin with respect to crime also apply to cash. Yes, and they might have added the additional point that cash is actually the mass market solution! And why worry about Bitcoin being used for money laundering when money laundering with cash is rampant? This is a very good point.

When is someone going to do something about this crazy state of euro banknote affairs? It’s not as if the authorities do not know about the pernicious and appalling consequences of Europe’s high cash usage.

Boris Boillon was arrested as he boarded a Brussels-bound train at the Gare du Nord on July 31st. The French diplomat turned businessman wore blue jeans and a sports shirt and carried €350,000 plus $40,000 in cash, but no identity papers and no telephone… illustrated the explosion of the underground economy, which is greatly facilitated by the €500 banknote

[From The €500 note: a glamorous instrument for criminals – European News | Latest News from Across Europe | The Irish Times – Mon, Nov 04, 2013]

See that. Not “greatly facilitated” by Bitcoin or prepaid cards or M-PESA but by the means of exchange actually provided by the European Central Bank! How are they allowed to print 500 euro notes that have no legitimate use?

UK Financial Intelligence Unit banned the sale and exchange of €500 banknotes in Britain. The unit’s study showed more than 90 per cent of €500 notes in the UK were used by criminals.

[From The €500 note: a glamorous instrument for criminals – European News | Latest News from Across Europe | The Irish Times – Mon, Nov 04, 2013]

As I wrote six years ago, it really annoys me to see innovation in electronic transactions undermined by concerns about crime when cash gets a free pass. It was obvious from the start that it was a stupid decision to print such high value bank notes.

One of the things that I learned was that the money-launderers best friend, the 500 euro note, is increasing in popularity as it strives to replace the $100 bill as the criminals’ store-of-value of choice.

[From Digital Money: More on the cash menace]

And by the way, it is not only techno-utopian electronic transaction nerds like me that think that this is an odd state of affairs. Surely it ought to be one of the ECBs explicit goals to raise the cost of criminal activity, not to obtain seigniorage from subsidising it.

“I don’t understand why we’re still making €500 banknotes,” Jean-Baptiste Carpentier, the director of Tracfin, the unit that fights money-laundering at the French finance ministry, testified last year. Most French shops accept neither €500 nor €200 banknotes.

[From The €500 note: a glamorous instrument for criminals – European News | Latest News from Across Europe | The Irish Times – Mon, Nov 04, 2013]

I’ve always been baffled by this. I have absolutely no idea why €500 notes were ever printed. There is no good argument for keeping them, and some very good economic arguments for getting rid of them. including some that may not have occurred to you (or to me, for that matter). One of them is that electronic currency removes the zero floor on interest rates, which I’ve mentioned before. Another is…

[Bank of America analyst Athanasios Vamvakidis] raises another interesting point that might benefit Europe: abolishment of the 500 € bill would most likely reduce demand for euros, making the currency weaker. This would give much-needed support to the euro zone economies that are highly dependent on exports, and are only now starting to leave the recession behind them.

[From The 500 € note dilemma: getting rid of bin Laden once more]

It’s time for action. Something must be done.

These are personal opinions and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinions of�
Consult Hyperion or any of its clients or suppliers

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.

You might expect central banks to be somewhat ambivalent about the replacement of cash with more efficient electronic alternatives that reduce the overall total social cost of payments in the economy. That's because the minting of coins and the printing of banknotes is a very profitable activity and a central bank monopoly. It's not as lucrative as it used to be, because the high cost of metal has reduced the seiginiorage on coins (in fact, for low-value coins it is by and large negative already) and low interest rates have reduced the income from the note issue. I don't have exact figures in front of me, but I imagine that the Bank of England's income on note issue this year is somewhere between a half and a third of what it was a few years ago. The Bank of England don't actually get to keep the loot, I should point out, because they are forced to remit the interest earned to the Treasury. This is in effect a handy stealth tax on the poor, the old and, to be fair, the criminal since they are the people who use cash. I can't help but wonder why central banks aren't charged with at least contributing to an improvement in the efficiency of the payment system (that would be something they could do that is good for everybody!) but they don't seem to be.

In most developed countries the use of cash in economically useful transactions that are of benefit to the economy (for example, retailing) is steadily falling, whereas the amount of cash "in circulation" is rising, opening up the cash gap that we've discussed before. The Netherlands is an interesting case study, because it has almost universal bank account coverage, is almost exclusively PIN debit at POS and has the bank account-based iDEAL for online payments. The general populace has begun to dispense with low-value coins and at the other end of the money scale, Euroclear Netherlands has gone completely digital. There are no longer paper share certificates in the country that invented share certificates back in the sixteenth century. Incidentally, Belgium is going the same way, but with an interesting twist.

It introduced a 1% tax on shares being dematerialized this year, rising to 2% next year. That's just the start. From 2016, the paper will slowly but surely become worthless, with 10% of the face value evaporating each year.

[From In Belgium, Some Paper Fans Shirk the Shredder – WSJ.com]

The European Commission has proposed complete dematerialisation for 2020, and I shouldn't imagine many would argue with that, although I'm sure there will be a tinge of sadness attached to the passing of the share certificate. People who collect share certificates as history and art must hate people like Euorclear as much as people who collect coins and bank notes hate e-cash nutters like me. By the way, why not do the same with €200 and €500 notes prior to their abolition? Just pass a law that they will be worth 10% less each year… But back to retail. Some retailers are already cash-free and some supermarkets do not accept cash at night.

A coffeebar company in The Netherlands only accepts debit cards as a payment method, cash is banned. Tourist that fear being charged for purchases made abroad leave without their cappuccinos.

[From Payment Hype and Delusions of Grandeur | FinVentures]

Well, SEPA and the regulation of cross-border interchange will take care of all that (I have a prepaid euro MasterCard that I use in such circumstances). In so many ways the Netherlands is blazing the electronic payments trail, so I was surprised to read that the central bank is not more enthusiastic about getting rid of the inefficient and outmoded medium of exchange it is responsible for.

While not frowning per se on the current experiments with cashless shops, DNB says that it would regard any larger-scale refusal or pricing of cash payments as "undesirable".

[From Finextra: Dutch central bank comes down in favour of hard cash]

I thought I would check out some figures to see just what the dynamics are in the Dutch market. When I was last there (in fact, the last few times I've been there) I don't remember using cash at all except in the truly bizarre case of topping up my transit card in machines that don't take Visa or MasterCard.

The latest research by DNB reveals that the volume of debit card payments at Dutch points of sale has increased from €81 billion in 2010 to €84 billion in 2012. At the same time, cash withdrawals at ATMs dropped from €52 billion in 2010 to €49 billion in 2012.

[From DNBulletin: Cash: we can't do without it yet – De Nederlandsche Bank]

According to the figures from the Bank, however, Dutch M0 (the notes in coins in circulation) was €46 billion at the end of May 2013, up from €45 billion at the end of May 2012. In the last year, then, the use of cash at POS has gone down and cash withdrawals at ATMs have gone down, yet there is more cash in circulation. What is this cash being used for? The DNB bulletin doesn't say, but I think we should be told. If I was to take a wild guess, I'd say it was because one of the main uses of euros in the Netherlands is to avoid tax. This might be the toughest barrier for electronic payments to overcome: persuading small merchants to go legit. I'll blog some more about this soon, but for now I'll just flag up this this comment which, although it comes from India, accounts for a substantial fraction of the inertia in Europe.

What REALLY concerned me was that even if I wanted to get a receipt and pay extra and offer to pay the extra 2% to process electronic payments, or NEFT the money to the merchant, they were in most cases unwilling to accept these payments

[From (4) Can a swish of a pen – i.e. govt. policy – accelerate electronic payments?]

In other words, and to spell it out clearly, some retailers don't want to get rid of cash because they use it to evade tax.

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] While Starbucks is generally in the headlines here in the UK because of their corporate tax affairs, they are generally in my headlines because of their groundbreaking approach to innovation at the point-of-sale (POS). Innovation which, it has to be said, has been something of a success.

In January 2011, Starbucks became the first national retailer to offer its own mobile payment technology combined with a world-class loyalty program, and the company now generates over three million mobile transactions each week in the U.S. alone – accounting for approximately 10% of total U.S. tender

[From ADDING MULTIMEDIA Starbucks Introduces Innovative Cross-Channel, Multi-Brand Loyalty Program and Announces Global Social Impact Initiatives at Annual Meeting of Shareholders | Business Wire]

I've got the Starbucks app on my iPhone and I use it all the time. What's more, even though it's a Sterling account I use it in the US as well and it works perfectly there too. And they haven't stopped at experimenting with the app: they are exploring a variety of possibilities.

Square and Starbucks have struck a payments deal. As an astute analyst has pointed out, Starbucks can now use the Square system to extend the purchasing power of Stars. Square's technology doesn't see a difference between dollars and Stars, at least not natively. I suppose there will eventually be a regulation. But for now, there's no reason why Starbucks cannot issue Stars at will, and allow people to spend their Stars through Square on anything you can buy in Square. Which is, anything.

[From Terra Nova: World's biggest bank in 2023: Starbucks?]

In the UK, Starbucks now accepts contactless payments as well (a mere seven years after the first pilot of contactless in Starbucks) so it has become a wonderful living laboratory for emerging payments. I think that perhaps it is time, in the UK at least, to do something spectacular with that laboratory. But what?

Starbucks have been getting some terrible publicity concerning their tax arrangements. Personally I think it is the duty of corporate officers to minimise their tax liability since they work for the shareholders and where there are problems with the tax laws we should blame the tax authorities, not companies that behave perfectly legally in response to the incentives set for them by politicians. But that's by the by. Who am I against so many?

Talking about politicians, last year the Treasury Minister David Gauke got into a lot of trouble for saying that people who paid tradesmen in cash were aiding and abetting tax evasion and forcing every is to pay more. I never understood the criticism, since what he said was absolutely true.

Tradesmen have accused the Government of letting them down after David Gauke, a Treasury minister, criticised those who accepted cash-in-hand payments in order to cheat the tax man.

[From Tradesmen's anger over cash-in-hand claims – Telegraph]

People who use cash are, indeed, aiding and abetting tax evasion (and the discriminating against the poor as well, but that's another topic) so this gave me an idea. Starbucks could exploit that dynamic and earn themselves a unique position, a moral motte inside the payments bailey, that will simultaneously generate significant goodwill, free publicity, brownie points with the Revenue and the potential to substantially reduce operating costs. Starbucks should ban cash.

This would be a genius move! I don't believe there's anyone who goes into a Starbucks without either a mobile phone, a debit card or a Starbucks card. There'd be no problem in getting them to use these instead of cash. And getting rid of cash would mean getting rid of cash registers, which means more counter space available for sales, as well as getting rid of cashing up, security and all the other attendant drains on time and resources. And once cash is removed as a payment possibility, the ergonomics of the POS can be changed for the better to make the whole purchasing process smoother.

I'm sure they have some clever PR people who could help to retarget public anger about tax evasion, which would be to their benefit, and throw down the gauntlet to other retailers to follow suit. By firing an opening broadside in the war against cash, Starbucks could do us all a favour. I think I'll mention this to Starbucks when I bump into them at Europe's Customer Festival organised by our good friends at Terrapinn. The festival is in London on the 16th and 17th of September 2013 and they've got a terrific line up of speakers from Tesco, Sainsbury's, Waitrose, eBay and other retailers as well. I'll be there taking part in a couple of the sessions, and I hope you will be too.

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] In their report on “Payments Innovation and the Use of Cash“, the Market Platform Dynamics team pull together some very useful data and structure an even more useful background for discussing the use of cash. It is well worth a read, and I say that not because it is in broad agreement with the report that Consult Hyperion were commissioned to prepare for an international cash-based business a couple of years ago (phew!) but because anything that encourages more detailed analysis of the relationship between cash and electronic payments is very helpful in the strategic planning process for many of our clients (sorry to be so selfish!). I very much liked the way that report categorises a variety of influencers and uses them to consider market trajectories. I will remark only the first two of them here:

• Governments and their interest in and need to sustain cash, which will differ country by country. For instance, there could be efforts undertaken in countries to clamp down on the shadow economy thru tax policies that make it harder to shield cash from the taxing authorises, like is being done in several European countries today.
• Banks and their interest in and cost to support cash. For instance, banks may make it easier or harder for customers to access cash based on their cost of handling it; some countries have also made it harder to access cash by eliminating the ability to get cash over the counter or by consolidating ATM networks.

Later in the report, they talk about another influencer…

One influencer that bodes well in favour of cash in the UK is the economy.

This reflects the British Retail Consortium (BRC) annual survey figures that were available to the authors.

Cash was used in 5.7 per cent more transactions in 2011, accounting for 58 per cent of all transactions. But the cost of the average shopping basket fell to £10.45 in 2011 from £12.93 in 2010.

[From Cash Use Up In Tough Times – BRC Publishes Annual Payments Survey ]

It looked as if consumers were shunning cards and returning to cash in difficult economic times. I never understood why this would be the case, since it is much harder to track your cash spending than your debit card spending. However, the new figures have just been released, and they show a different picture.

The BRC’s Cost of Payment Collection Survey 2012 shows that, while over half of transactions (54.4 per cent) are paid in cash, use has declined as a percentage both of number of transactions (down 6.7 per cent) and money spent (down 9.7 per cent). This is the first time in the survey’s 13 year history that both measures have seen a decline.

[From British Retail Consortium – Policies & Issues Content ]

I went off to the Bank of England and had a look at the the latest figures for notes and coin and reserve balances where you can see that while the use of cash fell 10% at retailers last year, the amount of cash in circulation rose another 6%. This is a consistent pattern. On the one hand, we hear that “cash is king” because the amount of cash in circulation keeps increasing but on the other hand its use to support commerce keeps falling. So what is all that cash being used for? If you look at the UK figures, you will see (as with comparable European figures) that the bulk of the growth in cash in circulation is in large denomination notes. These are not used in retail transactions (indeed, a great many retailers will not accept them) but they are used in a variety of underground transactions: money laundering, corruption, tax evasion and so forth. The figures look clear to me: cash is a subsidy from the law-abiding to the criminal.

As an aside, I was thinking of dropping David and the team a note to ask if they might include another factor in the pro-cash column: life expectancy…

The software also detects obscure correlations. People who frequent ATMs so they can make cash payments tend to live longer than those who prefer writing cheques or paying with credit cards, it turns out.

[From Insurance data: Very personal finance | The Economist]

I find this utterly astonishing, particularly since cash usage correlates strongly with income level, but what do I know. There must be underlying causation since the mere correlation seems implausible. I wonder if they have it the wrong way round though. Maybe it is older people, who have already lived longer, who are more likely to go to ATMs? Either way, I hope the MPD team will add life expectancy to one of their columns in the next version of the report!

These are personal opinions and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinions of�
Consult Hyperion or any of its clients or suppliers

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] Some years ago, Ronnie O’Toole from the Central Bank of Ireland was kind enough to come along and give a talk at our annual Forum in London. Apart from the fact it was a terrific talk in all respects, I always remember it because he brought up the topic of taxis as a benchmark for cash replacement and this struck me at the time as the perfect prosaic platform to assess the evolution of alternatives. As anyone who reads this blog will have noticed, I’ve continued to annoy taxi drivers around the globe almost continuously since then. I’m writing this in a Florida hotel room and I paid the taxi to get here using a card. Admittedly, the driver took the payment using a circa-1959 zip-zap machine, but hey, at least I didn’t use cash.

As was discussed back at the Digital Money Forum, after an excellent presentation by Ronnie O’Toole from National Irish Bank, a significant step toward cash replacement would be for taxi regulators to insist that cabs take contactless. This was part of the bank’s submission to the Irish Department of Finance: “The taxi regulator should make it compulsory for all taxis and hackneys to accept payment by debit or credit cards by the 1st of November 2008″.

[From Digital Money: User inexperience]

They didn’t, as far as I know, but I’m happy to report that when I jumped in a cab to go and listen to Ronnie (amongst others) at the International Cashless Society Roundtable (ICSR) 2013 in Dublin, not only was I able to pay by card, I was able to pay by card to the driver’s mobile phone! I knew Ronnie’s benchmark was good one. Taxis that don’t take cash are the hallmark of a civilised society.

We didn’t spend too much time on taxis as a specific sector at the round table, but we did have a series of genuinely interesting discussions — many of them grounded in the new Irish National Payments Plan — about the steps on the road to a cashless society. This is taken very seriously in Ireland because the payment system is particularly inefficient, with high levels of cash and cheque usage. Ronnie had just written an article about this for the Central Bank of Ireland Quarterly Bulletin (it’s “The Usage, Cost and Pricing of Retail Payments in Ireland” on page 74), and he explained the problem in some detail.

Ireland has the second highest usage of cheques in Europe, the highest ATM withdrawal per capita and still pays out half of all social welfare payments in cash. Cheques are a very expensive form of payment, and much less efficient than debit cards. Ireland could save up to €1bn per year by migrating to more efficient payment instruments. One impediment to a faster migration is that the pricing of payments in Ireland is not commensurate with the cost of provision.

I think this is a particularly important point. It came up on the lobbyists panel at the CNP Expo in Orlando this week as well and I’ll blog more about it when I’ve got time. Ronnie had some numbers to hand:

Only 46% of the costs of providing cash and cheques services are recouped by banks, with significant cross- subsidisation at the expense of electronic payments… Banks in Ireland suffered combined losses of €172m in the provision of cash and cheque services in 2009, which were largely offset by their highly profitable credit card business, which showed a profit of €140m.

The efficient electronic payment systems are being forced to subsidise to inefficient paper payment systems. Why is this allowed to continue? Surely it should be a goal of any national payment strategy to reduce the use of cash and cheques in favour of electronic alternatives and not, as Chancellor George Osborne advocates, leave cash alone and make cheques clear slightly quicker. If people want to carry on using cash and cheques then fine, but make them pay for it.

To the argument that “well, it’s poor people who use cash so if you increase the cost of cash you will punish the poor” I say this: people who are trapped in the cash economy already pay far higher transactions costs than people who are not.

I really enjoy this kind of event: real experts taking part in real discussions. I felt that I learned something from every exchange. So many thanks to Dr. Fergal Carton from the Financial Services Innovation Centre at the University College Cork for pulling it all together. I’m looking forward to the 2014 event already.

These are personal opinions and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinions of�
Consult Hyperion or any of its clients or suppliers

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] Yesterday, I made the statistically well-founded claim that most cash appears to be used for crime and I mentioned Carol Benson, from our good friends at Glenbrook Consulting, who was one of the authors of their excellent Payment Systems in the US. That reminded me that Carol had made this straightforward observation after reading Forum friend David Wolman’s “The End of Money“:

But the truth is we really don’t know why non-criminals use cash.

[From Don’t Trash-Talk Cash — Payments Views from Glenbrook Partners]

She goes on to make an excellent, and perfectly sensible, suggestion for some focused, multi-disciplinary work, on the topic.

What research there is tends to focus on patterns of use (diary studies, etc.), rather than on the “why” of use. I was frustrated a couple of years ago, when I tried to raise funds for a study on the psychology of cash usage: I got no interest from our payments industry clients and colleagues… But cash is still a preferred method of payment for a great number of people. And whether you like cash or not, it’s not going away any time soon… It seems to me that we need to know more than we do about the psychology of why people like using cash.

[From Don’t Trash-Talk Cash — Payments Views from Glenbrook Partners]

I actually have a tiny amount of experience of this. A few years ago, for a reason not germane to the tale, I had to go to a large supermarket in the North of England and spend some time standing at the checkout line asking people about their payment choices. This was shortly before the particular supermarket chain was to stop accepting cheques. We turned up at the store early in the morning before it opened for business and had a chat with the manager about the payments methods and their impact on his operations. Then, when the store opened for business, I went to one of the lanes and asked people who did not pay using cards (which, by the way, was most of them) why they had chosen either cheques or cash. The answers broadly speaking were that people who pay by cheque did so because they liked having the written record of spending in the form of notes written in their cheque book. They weren’t really cheque users, they were cheque stub users. I remember thinking at the time that this might be a key element of functionality to incorporate into the mobile payment systems for the future because the delivery of electronic receipts directly into a mobile wallet might be a key factor in persuading members of the public to use the mobile payment mechanism.

For the people using cash, as I recall, it was mainly a question of budgeting and the “jam jarring” of household expenditure. I know from our work on the delivery of financial services to socially excluded groups with the Payments Council and the Technology Strategy Board that managing multiple pots of money is a general problem for a great many people and that making this an element of the wallet proposition is a win-win because it provides genuine added value to the users.

The London Rebuilding Society (LRS) and Consult Hyperion have been awarded funding by the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) to explore the use of the television as a channel for payments for socially-excluded groups, using both bank accounts and pre-paid “jam jar” accounts to explore the relationship between financial and social inclusion.

[From Press the red button for financial inclusion]

This work has gone on to look at the use of mobiles in the provision of services and the use of smartphones to provide context-aware financial support (e.g., helping people to budget properly), so I’m really looking forward to the Wallet Wars conference in New York next week where I thought I might test out my hypotheses around budgeting and receipting to see if the context and drivers are similar in the US market. Replacing cash is not about price/performance (ie, telling people it’s cheaper and quicker) but about better functionality. And now, a commercial break…

Wallets are hot right now. That’s why over 150 decision makers from the biggest banks, financial institutions, retailers and network operators are signed up for Wallet Wars on 8-9 March 2013 in New York. Here’s why you should join them.

Consult Hyperion global ambassador Dave Birch will be chairing the first day of Wallet Wars, covering topics such as customer acquisition, security, integration with loyalty and ticketing and whether new entrants will beat incumbents. Companies and organisations presenting include RBS, Mercantile Bank and Movenbank.�

On day two, Dave will be sharing his opinions on the future of identity and money. By quoting ‘Dave Birch’ when you book your place you can get $100 off registration. See who else is going at� http://www.mformobile.com/mobile-wallet-wars-usa/attendees.php and then book to join them at� https://secure.mformobile.com/mobile-wallet-wars-usa/register.php.

But back to Carrol’s point. I will be very interested in seeing the results of a study on the use of cash in retail environments because I do think we need to understand more about the dynamics around its usage. However, I don’t think this kind of study will give us the whole picture. When discussing “peak cash” earlier in the week I made that claim that the only reasonable explanation for the growth in the narrow money supply in developed countries is crime. I think this is demonstrably true. But I want to press the issue a little harder. Cash is not a neutral facilitator of crime, its effects are more pernicious because cash doesn’t just facilitate crime and corruption, it stimulates them.

I found academic papers noting incidents in which cops would find a stash house, but wouldn’t bust the place until all or most of the drugs had been sold. There’s no return on a house full of dope. There’s plenty of return on a house full of cash.

[From Highway Robbery | The Agitator]

The mere existence of untraceable, anonymous cash puts temptation in the way of people who might otherwise stay on the straight and narrow path.

Warwickshire police has confirmed that £113,000 went missing after being held in a “secure storage area” at its former headquarters.

[From Inquiry launched after £113,000 stolen from police station – Telegraph]

I’ve said before that I don’t believe for one moment that getting rid of cash would stop crime. It wouldn’t. But reducing the amount of cash in circulation and removing the higher-value notes from circulation would at least increase the cost of crime. That would be a start.�

These are personal opinions and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinions of�
Consult Hyperion or any of its clients or suppliers

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] In a talk at SXSW 2013, Facebook’s Head of Identity Products, the super-clever (and super-nice) Sam Lessin, referred in passing to the concept of “peak cash” and wondered out loud if we had gone past that point yet. Well, I think I have the answer. It’s yes, and of course, no. (We are consultants, after all!). Or, to explain it another way, no and yes. No, we have not reached peak cash as the amount of cash “in circulation” is still going up. But yes, the peak use of cash to support commerce has passed.

Here’s what I mean. Reading an interesting story — “Boosting the Money Plane” — about a big robbery in Bloomberg Business Week (25th February 2013) I noted the statistic that cash-in-transit (CIT) is a $14 billion business in the USA. The Federal Reserve physically moves around $640 billion per annum! Given this enormous amount of pointless atom shifting, it is truly surprising to note that there are so few CIT robberies (less than one each week on average) although I suppose that is a reflection of the amount of money is spent on guards and guns and “smart water” and whatever else. But why is all this money being spent and all the cash being shifted around? To support the trade and commerce at the heart of the economy? Now that we have invented laser beams and transistors, shouldn’t we be using less of the stuff?

We don’t seem to be. To resolve the paradox you have to look at the data. As the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, John Williams, wrote in their annual report for 2012, the evidence is that, even though the amount of cash has continued to climb, the share of transactions using cash has fallen steadily in recent years. As the (smoothed) graph below shows, the value of low denomination bills (presumed to be a reasonable proxy measure for commerce) lags economic growth whereas the value of high denomination bills is way ahead of economic growth (the figures for Europe are similar).

The figures are unequivocal. Most US cash is in the form of $100 bills and it is presumed that most of it isn’t in the US. The rest of the world has taken US currency and stuffed it under the beds of drug dealers, in the suitcases of money launderers and the freezers of corrupt politicians (no, wait, that was in the US). This is a gigantic interest free loan from the world’s criminals to the US Treasury.

Most U.S. paper currency by volume (number of notes) is used in the United States, with the $1, $5, $10, and $20 notes making up the lion’s share of all transactions. But because the dollar is widely trusted abroad, most U.S. currency (by value) is held in foreign countries, primarily in $50 and $100 denominations. The Federal Reserve Board of Governors reports that the volume of cash in circulation has more than doubled (from 13.5 billion to 31.3 billion) in the past 20 years, and the value of that cash has more than tripled (from $268.2 billion to $1.03 trillion).

[From Meeting the Demand for Cash :: Nelson Oliver, Research Analyst, Dan Littman, Economist :: Spring 2012 :: 04.13.2012 :: Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland]

There’s a trillion dollars in cash out there, yet cash accounts for only 0.2% of all transactions in the US by value. It is inconsequential in the support of the commerce. Once again we return to the apparent paradox of the growth of e-payments and the simultaneous growth of cash that is entirely inappropriately labelled “in circulation”.

The rapid growth of substitutes for cash, particularly debit and credit cards, has led economists to predict the advent of the “cashless society”. Yet cash holdings in most developed economies continue to grow and in the U.S., per capita currency holdings now amount to $3000.

[From The myth of the “cashless society”: How much of America’s currency is overseas? – Munich Personal RePEc Archive]

I strongly doubt that the average citizen of the US has anything like $3,000 in cash under their bed at any one time (although to be honest the median might be climbing following events in Cyprus). Spot the mistake in the following paragraph from the same report…

Even a cursory examination of the growth and magnitude of the U.S. currency supply in circulation with the public reveals that predictions of the advent of the “cashless society” are unfounded.

Yes, of course, I’m sure you spotted the same error. Once again, the idea that the currency is “in circulation” is utterly mistaken. As indeed is recognised later on in the text as the paper goes on to discuss various estimates for the amount of US currency overseas (In passing, it notes the extent to which US dollars circulate in Canada, something I had no idea about) and comes up with two broad hypotheses in an attempt to explain the figures. These are summarised thus.

The first posits that a large fraction of U.S. currency is held abroad, the second that large amounts of cash are employed to undertake transactions that individuals and firms prefer to hide from the government either to avoid taxes, regulations or punishment for illegal activities.

Like many other industry observers, I had assumed that the former explanation accorded more closely with reality since the quoted figures for US currency in circulation have consistently estimated that most of the “unexplained” cash is outside the US and unlikely to be repatriated (see above). My standard text on US payment systems, Scott Lofteness and Carol Benson’s excellent Payment Systems in the US says that economists put the figure at 60%. However, the new estimates put forward in Edgar’s paper would seem to indicate the latter: that is, the domestic underground economy is soaking up cash in the US just as it is in Europe. If correct, that makes for an interesting rethink on the government’s (lack of) strategy toward cash. If the cash is overseas, causing mayhem somewhere else, then foreigners are lending Uncle Sam money. If the cash is at home then it is a stealth tax on the honest and a subsidy to the dishonest.

According to a forthcoming study by the Institute for Business in the Global Context (IBGC) at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, cash is a major vector for tax evasion in the U.S., likely costing the government more than $75 billion in missing tax revenue. The Fletcher School’s research also indicated that U.S. households invest $31 billion worth of time annually accessing cash, while businesses lose $40 billion worth of cash to theft, counterfeit and accident.

[From Public-Private Dialogue on Cost of Cash Progresses in D.C. | MasterCard Social Media Newsroom]

What do these figures tell us? They tell us that all around the world, the principal function of cash in developed economies is no longer to support commerce, but to support crime.

The U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing produced 8.4 billion notes last year, including a record three billion hundred-dollar bills. Yet even while cash in circulation is growing, it is becoming increasingly marginalized for retail transactions.

[From The End of Cash? – Barrons.com]

Record numbers of $100 bills that you can’t even spend in most shops! If you have another explanation for the volume and distribution of cash, other than crime I mean, I’d be genuinely interested in hearing and sharing it.

These are personal opinions and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinions of�
Consult Hyperion or any of its clients or suppliers

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] New York, New York. My kind of town. Sometimes you’re up, sometime’s you’re caught up in a sinister conspiracy…

Chapter 1. It’s Terminal

There was no reason to be suspicious at first. I had no idea they were on to me. I was about to get on the plane, when I decided I needed one more cup of Joe to get the day going. I walked up and ordered. I saw the contactless reader and I tapped my watch against it, just like any normal civilian. I went to pick up my mug and head for a quiet corner. But the dame on the desk had other ideas.

“Excuse me, sir” she said. I spun round, sizing up the situation and lifting onto the balls of my feet, ready for anything.

“I’m afraid it’s been declined”.

Declined? What the hell! What was the explanation? The watch was a valid MasterCard and the account was loaded with dough, so there was no rational explanation. There’s no way that the folk at Kalixa would have declined a perfectly valid transaction like this. Maybe the transaction never reached them. It must have been sabotage. Maybe… someone was on to me, and they wanted to make my life difficult. They wanted to make me use cash. But who?

I tried not to show any emotion as I walked back and nonchalantly tapped my Visa debit card against the reader.

“That’s fine, thank you” said the girl. Was she in on it? Her veneer of bored indifference might have been just that. But I don’t know, it didn’t seem to add up. Who could tap in to the acquiring network and sabotage a card authorisation like that? I needed time to think.

I left the cafe area and tried to disappear into a corner of the terminal. With the cup at my lips, I started to think. Okay, so when you’re the only guy in the country who has no cash at all, you’re going to stand out. I tried not to look like the guy with no cash, I tried to look like everyone else in the terminal. No, I did look like everyone else in the terminal. But someone out there knew. Someone must be on to me.

One of the guys at the European Central Bank? They could certainly pull the strings. I shouldn’t have called for their board to be arrested for conspiring to evade taxes and aiding and abetting money laundering. I should have kept quiet on that one. Me and my big mouth. But could they organise something like this? Keep it secret? And short notice? No. So maybe it goes higher up than the money men.

The Chancellor. It must be. I tried hard to cover my tracks, but maybe the guys over at Spook Central have made some connections. Sure, the rubes at The Daily Telegraph comments section might not know that “Apoplectic of Woking” is yours truly, but what about the white hats in the West Country? They could have been correlating the devastating and witty attacks on the Chancellor’s economic policies with IP addresses and phone tracking. They could know that it was me making the unanswerable case for a Land Value Tax and the abolition of corporate taxation. They could know.

I needed more evidence.

Chapter 2. Mean streets.

It was warm. Too warm for the thick black overcoat I brought with me to Manhattan. I didn’t fit in, I stood out as the clown that didn’t read the weather forecast. No good. I went back to the hotel and ditched the coat. Back out on Madison I was just like any other citizen. Warm, but not hot. And yes, my pockets were still clean as a whistle. No bills, no coins. But I was pretty sure no one could tell.

I needed to find out if they were still tracking me, whoever “they” might be. I pulled into what looked like an average diner and I ordered the most average lunch I could think of. And yes, it was a pretty average pot roast. When the check came, I flicked my Simple Visa card down, like it was the most normal thing in the world. A guy in a jacket took it away and for a moment I thought I would never see it again, but he came back a minute later with a slip for me to sign. I didn’t want to give anything away, so I picked it up all casual like, and scrawled Sergio Aguero on the dotted line. I tossed the pen back on the table and strolled out like it was nothing. So far so good.

On the way back to the hotel I realised I was thirsty and I wanted to pick up a drink to take back to the hotel. I saw a Duane Reade and glancing left and right to make sure I wasn’t being followed, I slipped in through the door and disappeared between the shelves. Once I was certain I wasn’t being tailed I went to the cranberry juice and I grabbed some milk too. I walked up to the counter and handed them to the sister standing there. She scanned them. I was about to reach for my back pocket and pull out a card, when I noticed something. I glanced down, trying not to look as if I was looking, and spotted an unfamiliar badge on the terminal. Unless I was much mistaken, it was a Google Wallet logo.

Google? They’ve certainly got the money and they’ve certainly got the connections. But why would they want me to use cash? It didn’t make sense, so I had to try them out, maybe get them to show their hand. I reached in my coat pocket, and felt the sister’s eyes following me. I pulled out the phone. I glanced at the screen, pretty sure that she couldn’t see, and I touched the Google Wallet icon. Yes, it was working normally. Then I tapped my phone against the terminal, just like it was the sort of thing I did every day. It worked fine. Paid. She gave me a strange look. I couldn’t read it. Maybe she’d made me. Time to go. I jumped in a cab.

“48th and 3rd”, I said. That wasn’t where I was going, it was a couple of blocks away, but I couldn’t take any chances. I didn’t know if the driver was working for them or not. We pulled up at the light on 3rd. I notice the payment terminal in the back of the cab has a contactless reader. My phone was already in my hand. I couldn’t resist it. I tapped. And paid. Google Wallet worked flawlessly. Again. There’s no way it could be those guys, I could rule them out.

In a flash I was out the cab and round the corner, doubling back to Lexington. I looked at my screen, and got a shock. Who the hell are JTL Management? I thought I’d just paid a yellow cab, but it must have been a fake, one of their stooges who picked me up to see where I was going. These people are clever.

Chapter 3. Black Beans.

I took a different route back to the hotel. A basic precaution, but the sort of thing that a lot of beginners forget. I was racking my brains as I walked. Who was it who had tried to make me use cash? The more I thought about it, the longer the list of suspects. The ATM guys? The cash-in-transit guys? The security guards union, local #198? The drug cartels? Or maybe one of those fancy-schmancy accountants who help the big guys to smurf out the cabbage through overseas branches and then bring it all back without paying tax? My head was hurting.

I pulled out my phone and began to thumb through the headlines. Then I saw something that pulled me up short. I love Manhattan. I love Chipotle. And I love mobile payments. So when I read that Chipotle had a new app so that you could order and pay for the food with your phone, I couldn’t think about anything else. I had to try it. I went into Starbucks, ordered a coffee and sat down. I connected to the free Wi-Fi and then ran up a VPN through Toronto. Again basic precaution, again the sort of thing that a lot of beginners forget. It was only then that I went to the app store and pulled down the new toy. Once it was loaded, I powered it up with my Simple card details, finished my coffee and left, deliberately walking away from the Chipotle on Madison. I went back around the block and crouched hidden in a doorway. I pulled out the phone and ran the app.

It all worked perfectly. I ordered, giving the name Theogenes de Montford, then I walked in like I owned the place and went to the register to bring home the burrito. Love the smell of beef, sour cream and salsa. I had not even smelt cash all day. My card had worked, my phone had worked, my app had worked. Even though I’d had to turn on data roaming, so the burrito cost me about $200, I felt I was ahead of the game.

Chapter 4. Best and Worst.

I kicked back in my hotel room. Looking for some R’N’R time to myself, I grabbed the iPad and went to hook it up to the hotel’s 42-incher so that I could put my feet up and watch Jools Holland Guitar Heroes. Damn! I forgot my HDMI cable. I went up to 5th Avenue and found the Best Buy. I grabbed the cable and went to the desk. The tootsie at the terminal rang it up. I looked at the POS and saw the contactless symbol. I wanted to blend in. I figured, hey, who is gonna swipe when they could tap, so I got my Google Wallet out and went for it. Disaster. The cash commandos had got there first and…

Card? What card? I didn’t use no card. The tootsie behind the terminal is giving me the up-and-down. But I got no lettuce, so I reached for my pocket and grabbed my Simple card again. The terminal asked me for a PIN. What PIN? What the hell were they talking about? I didn’t have time to think because the Best Buy broad threw me a curve ball.

“Is it a debit card?” she asks me, all innocent like.

Well, I was just about to tell her, not really. It’s processed through the Visa signature debit system, but the funds are drawn from a shadow pre-paid account because Simple itself isn’t a bank. But then I realised – that would might give too much away. Stupid. I could’ve blown my cover right there. I decided to disguise myself as a harmless idiot, so I mumbled back “don’t know”. She looked at the card – I saw her do it.

“If it’s a credit card, just hit cancel” she says.

No sign of the house dick. I was sure I wasn’t being followed. I hit cancel, sign on the screen and scram. None of this is making sense.

Chapter 5. Declinegate.

My mind was reeling. How could the world of payments be getting so mixed up? Contactless terminals that don’t accept contactless payments! Valid watches being declined! Being asked for a PIN on a signature card! Asking customers to swipe a phone! Who is pulling the strings? It was time to go the papers and get the story out. I had to find a rag to tell my tale. I grabbed the phone book and started with the “As”. I pretty soon found “American Banker”. They sounded like the kind of guys who would go nuts for the inside dope on a front page story like this. I dropped a note to one of their newshawks and arranged a meet at an at out-of-the-way hash house. I waited incognito.

So I tell the guy. I’m no stool pidgeon, or indeed any other kind of pidgeon. Listen, I tell him, I’m behind the eight ball on this one. I ain’t here to bump gums. Someone out there wants me to break out the benjamins, see, and I ain’t gonna do it. They’re clever, that’s for sure. They’re trying to make it look like incompetence, bad planning and accidents. But it’s a conspiracy and I know it. I ain’t stringing you. This is on the square. Not a flimflam. It’s bigger than that, see. I tell the guy. Put two and two together. So much money spent – but nuttin’ works right. There’s a high pillow in the shadows and he’s your meat.

Chapter 5. Snapped by the Paps.

He was listening. He was listening all right. We arranged a meet for the next day, where I could spill the beans good and proper. I told him about the inexplicable design, the mysterious cab, the puzzling terminal, the incomprehensible messages. I told to look for the money. I told him that coincidences are stories for sheeple. I told him that he didn’t have to dig: the facts are staring him in the face.

But we were seen. Damn it, we were seen. Out of the corner of my I saw the guy in beige overcoat snap us and run. That was it. Game over. I had to leave town.

Get the story out, I tell him. I gotta blow. Goodbye Big Apple.

These are personal opinions and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinions of�
Consult Hyperion or any of its clients or suppliers

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] Peter Jones wrote a typically excellent piece called “Commission’s Four Year Delay in Cost Study Impacts Cash Displacement Benefits” for Payment Cards and Mobile magazine (April 2013). In it, he says plainly that “Europe’s cash mountain fuels the unofficial economy… at an unacceptably high level”. Too true. When I’ve written about this in the past, I’ve tended to view the unofficial economy as only one of the negative effects of cash on our society (looking also at the overall social costs) but reading Peter’s paper has convinced me that the time is right for a real war on cash. The tax revenues lost to European nations are astronomical and the unfairness of cash, which distributes its costs unevenly toward the poor, is no longer tolerable. I have long advocated a robust response.

Yet more incontrovertible evidence that €100, €200 and especially €500 euro notes are a curse, and that if the European Central Bank (ECB) keeps on printing them then it should be prosecuted under conspiracy laws.

[From See how smart you are when the K-9s come]

I was recently sent a Bank of America Merrill Lynch Rates & Currencies Research Note by Athanasios Vamvakidis (dated 9th April 2013) entitled “Time to get rid of the €500 bill?”. Reading it, I see that my forward thinking policies on euro banknotes are gaining traction. In it, Athanasios says that�

Although the ECB has no plans to remove the €500 bill from circulation, we argue that it should do so. It will weaken the euro, supporting the economy. It will address concerns that the bill is primarily used to hide illegal income. More importantly, we propose a scheme in which the removal of the bill will be a tax on illegal income, allowing using the proceeds to address the periphery crisis.

Which brings us back to Peter’s paper. Why hasn’t cash usage been falling in the supposedly developed EU economies? Peter says directly that “several Commission interventions have inadvertently created a blockage to raising more tax revenue and improving global EU payment efficiencies”. In other words, “we’re from the government and we’re here to help” has had its usual and entirely expected consequences.

The “Merchant Indifference Test” (MIT) is at the heart of this, as I was reminded in a conversation at EPCA. At dinner, a couple of people were reminiscing about “Proton”, the 1990s accounted electronic purse scheme that had been launched in Belgium. As one of my dinner companions pointed out, you could show merchants all the spreadsheets you liked proving that the electronic purse was cheaper than cash, it didn’t matter: the merchants didn’t want electronic money, they wanted cash because they didn’t want to pay tax. Cash wasn’t 2% or 5% or 10% cheaper than cards, it was 50% cheaper than cards. This is not recognised in the MIT, which makes it pointless.

Today a study suggested that the Belgian Government loses 30 billion euro every year through tax evasion and fraud (here). This is a big concern to me as I pay my exceptionally high taxes in Belgium and know what a difference 30bn would make to the average tax bill.

[From Why prepaid could make 30bn EUR for the Belgian Government « in2payments]

Indeed. Furthermore, why the MIT should be used as input to regulation remains utterly opaque. Evidence was promised, but as Peter politely notes, when the study to produce this evidence did not deliver the results anticipated by the Commission after four years, it started work on another one (which is costing a couple of million euros). This is unlikely to deliver the concrete evidence that people like me would want to see. The cost of cash isn’t simply the cost of the merchants putting it in the till and banking it. What about the cost of robberies and policemen? The costs of tax evasion and other crime? These costs are so great, and the European economies are in so much trouble, that they can no longer be tolerated.

These are personal opinions and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinions of�
Consult Hyperion or any of its clients or suppliers

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.