I am as subject to peer pressure as anybody else, so having been bombarded with the top three of this, the key five of that and the must-have ten of the other for 2015, here’s my three roubles* worth on what we at Consult Hyperion see happening next year.

Last year, we caved to the marketing pressures of modern business and put out a “hot five” technology blog post for 2014. For the most part, it was pretty accurate. Which ought to be no surprise, since as blog readers must realise, my colleagues at Consult Hyperion are always working on projects involving the exploitation of new technologies in the transactions business while I maintain the deceptive appearance of a blog based on random thoughts. As an example: my prediction that tokenisation would be hot in 2014 was a cheat based on the fact that I knew just how much tokenisation work was already going on all around me down at CHYP End, not a evidence for my crystal balls.

Dave Birch, founder and “global ambassador” at payments consultancy Consult Hyperion, believes that a new approach is needed. “I think the days of spending more and more on security like PCI-DSS are drawing to an end. The PAN- [permanent account number] centric card solutions will soon be replaced by chip and pin, tokenisation and new (identity-centric) alternative mechanisms,” says Birch.

[From Retail malware: PCI-DSS is part of the problem, says retail security specialist Slava Gomzin – 07 Aug 2014 – Computing Feature]

Why the quotes? Are they implying that I’m not really the “Global Ambassador”! But to the point. I also said that “proximity and vicinity” interfaces would be hot and I stand by that having seen both NFC and BLE become a focus. Of course, these two predictions were not entirely unconnected.

This has been reported as being a technology initiative that undermines NFC, whereas I tend to think that it dovetails with it.

[From The “hot five” retail transaction technologies for our clients in 2014 – Tomorrow’s Transactions]

I said APIs but that was also an easy prediction because everyone was saying the same thing and they were all right. I won’t say much more about this here as I’m going to be writing a couple of much longer posts about APIs early in the new year.

I said “recognition” because I could see that the increasing importance of transaction-appropriate identification and authentication technologies was shaping the business strategies available to our clients downstream and we are working on projects in that space right now. The key here is, as you might imagine, that the smartphone is capable to delivering a wide spectrum of identification and authentication possibilities and gives organisations real choices in how they recognise customers and how customers recognise them.

The one I didn’t think quite panned out as I was expecting was “small data”. I thought that more organisations would exploit the ability of the mobile to give customers a window into their own data and provide tools for managing and analysing that data. This certainly happened in some cases but not at the scale I was expecting (as I discovered when I tried to search my own bank accounts to find some transactions from a few months ago).

That was then, this is now.

This year I thought it will be interesting to take a slightly different tack, so I’ve chosen five areas where it is no secret that we are working on projects right now, but in a way I think even of our clients may not have seen just how important the new technologies are and the extent to which their business strategies will be constrained by seemingly low-level technology discussions that will be made over the coming year. So, with that in mind, here are my “live five” for 2015 where I think clients should pay serious attention to technology decisions that are being made in the short term because of what they mean for business in the long term.

The first area is in-app payments. Much of the discussion around ApplePay, tokenisation, NFC and retail has naturally focused on the “tap and pay” simplicity of the proposition. However, there are lots of reasons for thinking that this will be a sideshow rather than the main event. The introduction of tokenisation means that in-app payments (“app and pay”) can now be more secure than chip and PIN payments and since I rather imagine that most retailers would prefer no POS to enhanced POS and given the experiences that we already see around us from Uber to AirBnB and KFC, I think that in-app payments will become the norm, the most frictionless way to pay. Once again, this is hardly a wild

Priceline.com Becomes First Major Online Travel Agency to Integrate Apple Pay Into its Newly Updated iOS 8 App

[From Priceline.com Becomes First Major Online Travel Agency to Integrate Apple Pay Into… — NORWALK, Conn., Dec. 11, 2014 /PRNewswire/ –]

The second area is re-localisation. We’ve lived through a period where there is been great pressure for internationalisation and the globalisation of payment solutions. Nobody wants to travel with 100 different cards in their pocket and when I get off the plane in the US or Australia or anywhere else I expect to be able to use my Visa, MasterCard or American Express card just as I do at home. But a combination of factors ranging from interchange regulation to in-app payments to non-bank players means that we will see a swing back toward more domestic solutions. In many parts of the world national payment solutions are seeing a resurgence, many of them looking at China Unionpay as an exemplar. But I think the trend toward multiple three-party systems instead of a small number of four-party systems means that we may see a return to payment systems that are owned and operated by retailers, brands and perhaps even local communities.

The third area is privacy. Once we have reasonable identification and authentication technology in place we can begin an intelligent discussion about how to use it. My observation is that for many of our clients the opportunity to make privacy part of their customer proposition, something that must be founded on strong security, is now a feasible business strategy. Privacy, as can already been seen in the actions of Apple and Google, is moving from a back-office hygiene factor to an integral component of consumer products.

The fourth is the blockchain. In parallel with a demand for privacy there is a growing demand for transparency. When you look at how a product like Venmo is evolving you can see that certain groups within the population are opting for their own transparency and I think this represents an underlying and more general demand transparency from institutions. Trading digital assets using an open distributed public ledger means a new way of trading that can combine privacy and transparency to create new and trusted markets.

The uniqueness of blockchain assets (the end of double-spending!) may mean that the impact of the technology is also felt in the physical. The fifth area of focus is ID for the Internet of things, or IDIoT as I call it for short. I agree with the predictions I see all around about 2015 being a turning point in the evolution of the Internet things and I see examples of new collectivity and new devices around me all the time. What I don’t see is a security infrastructure emerging to manage those connections and manage those devices and this is where I think we may see intellectual effort rewarded in 2015. In fact, I can see that this might become the key focus area of the coming year as as the Internet of things comes together from digital assets that are traded transparently, previously for the people involved in the training, in-app transactions using a variety of local identity and payment systems make for a seamless new environments of interaction and transaction.

As always, I’m keen to see what you think, so please don’t be shy in the comments. I can take it!

* According to my calculations, the approximate value of tuppence ha’penny at the time of writing.

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.

As Oscar Wilde said, “When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money.”

As many of you will know, it has become a tradition to judge the Future of Money Design Competition at Consult Hyperion’s annual Tomorrow’s Transactions Forum in London in the Spring, recognising the role that art plays in helping us to understand what fintech might do and what transactions might become, beyond the limited imaginations of us in the industry.

In fact, we have long entrusted the task of representing our ideas of value to members of two professions that might seem to have little in common: banking and art.

[From The Believer – Gold, Golden, Gilded, Glittering by Rachel Cohen]

The truth is, we at Consult Hyperion ran the first art competition at the Forum a few years as an experiment and for fun. We’re always trying new things at the Forum. Some work, some don’t. Having come across some fantastic work in the field of money by students at the Royal College of Art, I thought the art competition would be enjoyable, but I was taken aback by just how popular it was. The delegates really enjoyed — and appreciated — the opportunity to see aspects of the future of transactions from an entirely different perspective.

In the Gilded Age, many of the banks that have recently played important and devastating roles in our financial life—Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers—were guided by men who had a passion for painting.

[From The Believer – Gold, Golden, Gilded, Glittering by Rachel Cohen]

You’ll be pleased to know that the tradition continues. As it has turned out, our delegates not only liked art, but they liked challenging art. So here we go again!

The Future of Money Design Competition for 2015 is now open and accepting entries. This year’s competition, again sponsored by our good friends at the excellent payments processing and fraud prevention company NCR Alaric, asks artists to design monetary systems based on ethics.

Should a payment card act as a policeman or an anarchist? A Bitcoin imbued with reactionary ideals or an M-PESA that aims at non-bank inclusion? Should payments be anonymous or tracked? Opaque or transparent? Almost any functionality can be created to the extent that, the limits to monetary development are not technological. The limits are bound within the social realm and are tangled within ethical philosophical questions that arise through living.

[From Competition – Future of Money]

We will be challenging creative thinkers and tinkerers to design an alternative electronic monetary system, which adheres to an ethical philosophy. If ‘John Stuart Mills’ were to design an electronic monetary system, what would it look like? How would a pragmatist ‘William James’ inspired monetary systems operate? Or a ‘ Russell Brand’ socialist egalitarian money ecosystem? We are not looking for patentable technologies, but hopeful (or woeful) visions of an alternative digital payment system which might inform which monetary systems we use, and what future systems might exist.

Please visit the competition web site for more details and tell your friends!

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.

Undercover at Money2020, our man in Las Vegas ls lost in booths, babes and benjamins. But can agent 0111 stop a killer new technology from falling into the wrong hands? It’s Main Street vs Infinite Loop in the major new blogbuster from CHYP End… welcome to… Pay Another Day

Part 11. Licence to Bill

“Well,” said S., “tell me about the toys old man.”

Bond started to tell S. about some of the things he’d seen on the exhibition floor and what things he’d heard people talking about in the corridors.

“Thing is, S., what I don’t understand is why these payment bods call their shindig ‘Money2020′ when all of the really interesting stuff is about identity, authentication, privacy and that sort of thing. Seems to me that once those sort of things are taken care of, the rest of the payment malarkey is just a bit of bookkeeping.”

S. didn’t want his opinons, though, just the facts. So Bond used his super-memory to tell S. about the technologies that he’d seen: apparently, NFC and tokenisation are all the rage, and improved “onboarding” (Bond wasn’t entirely sure what that meant) is the next big thing. There was also a lot of talk about financial inclusion, and this had a lot to do with mobile phones.

When Bond returned to his room, he found an envelope pushed under the door. He opened it carefully, and found two photographs inside. They looked as if they’d been taken by a long lens looking through a window. The first showed @dgwbirch looking at some sort of chart that seemed to be something to do with tokenisation.

The second seemed to be something to do with that indispensable handbook on the future of the industry, “Identity is the New Money“.

But what did they mean? And who had put them under his door? Clearly, someone wanted Bond to know that @dgwbirch was in this payments business up to his neck. Someone was telling Bond that @dgwbirch’s stupid tweets about South West Trains were just a front and the blind the scenes he was somehow involved in the really cool stuff going on in the payments world. This, Bond thought, was where the service should focus their efforts. Not only on @dgwbirch, but on the brains behind his operation back at CHYP End.

G. wanted a full report, together with detailed expenses claims and receipts, so Bond went off to see her. He finished by telling her his most important conclusion, the one he’d saved for last.

“Look”, said Bond, “it’s very clear to me that if you want to know something about the future of payments then you need to penetrate Consult Hyperion. I say we infiltrate a deep cover operative as an employee to keep an eye on them from the inside, and have them report back via a dead letter drop round the back of The Keystone.”

“Well,” said S., ever mindful of the department’s budget, “we could do that. Or we could read their thought-leadership Tomorrow’s Transactions blog at www.tomorrowstransactions.com, or attend one of their Tomorrow’s Transactions Unconferences, or get a ticket for their annual Tomorrow’s Transactions Forum or subscribe to their series of Tomorrow’s Transactions Podcasts.”

Fair enough, Bond was think as S. went through the options.

Bond walked back to the bar.

So it was true. The mobile wallet did exist, and A.P.P.L.E had snatched it from under the noses of M.C.X. The Cold War was over, and the Phoney War was about to begin. Bond grabbed the gin and tonic and let the magic liquid do its work.

Then he stood, turned, and walked out of the casino, blinking into the lunchtime sun. He waited in the taxi line, glancing at the boarding pass for Seattle on his phone. One day it will all settle down in the payments world, he thought, and no-one will need consultants any more. One day, he hoped, there would be peace. Just not yet.

See you all at Money2020 next year.

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.

Undercover at Money2020, our man in Las Vegas ls lost in booths, babes and benjamins. But can agent 0111 stop a killer new technology from falling into the wrong hands? It’s Main Street vs Infinite Loop in the major new blogbuster from CHYP End… welcome to… Pay Another Day

Part 10: Bitfinger

Back at the casino, Bond decided to take an R&R break at the tables. He had a formula. He needed three things to win. A beautiful woman on his arm, a gin and tonic in his hand and a lucky drunk Scotsman at his table.

The beautiful woman was walking towards him. “I don’t gamble,” she said.

“I don’t either”, said Bond, “I use a cautious probability-based strategy. It’s called Card Risk Assessment for Blackjack Scenarios, or CRABS for short. Why don’t you come with me and I’ll show my CRABS in action.”

She reached out an elegant hand. “Bailey”. 

“Bond”, he said, taking her arm in his. “James Bond”.

Curious, she walked with him past the slot machines towards the Blackjack games. Bond was looking along the tables to see if Lady Luck might be smiling on him tonight. She was. At the very last table, he heard what he had been hoping for.

“I’ve nae idea whether I’m up or doon, and I dinnae care now I’ve a wee dram or two!”

Perfect. James sat her down and slid in between her and drunk Scotsman. And started winning. His conservative and cautious approach married to aggressive doubling and buying at the right time served them both royally. When they stumbled blinking into the bright lights of the strip three hours later, Bailey 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool was a hundred dollars to the good.

Later that morning, Bond had just settled down for breakfast when he became aware of mounting panic in the crowd around him. People were staring at their iPhones in disbelief, showing their neighbours the news reports!

M.C.X had launched a first strike. President Cook had pressed the red button. All over America the lights were going out. The lights on the contactless terminals, that is. No-one could tap and pay in CVS. Or 7-Eleven. Or Rite Aid.

“The madmen”, Bond said under his breath as he rushed to report this unexpected development back to base. “The madmen. What are they doing?”

The strategy made no sense to him.

“Bows and arrows against the lightning”, he muttered, scanning news feed after news feed.

There was no way that they could take A.P.P.L.E out with that first strike, which meant that A.P.P.L.E’s revenge was guaranteed and certain to be terrible. And indeed it was. A.P.P.L.E’s MX missiles (Media eXclusion missiles) meant that it literally rained bad publicity across the whole of the M.C.X. empire. Within a couple of days, it looked all over.

McDonalds, which accepts Apple Pay at its 14,000 restaurants in the United States, said Apple Pay accounted for 50 percent of its tap-to-pay transactions. And Walgreens, the nationwide chain of drugstores, said its mobile wallet payments had doubled since Apple Pay came out

[From Apple Pay brings significant increase in mobile payments to retailers like Whole Foods and McDonald’s, increases awareness of Google Wallet and… | Killer Apps TV]

What’s more, under cover of the A.P.P.L.E assault, G.O.O.G.L.E forces were beginning to encroach into M.C.X. territory and spies reported that the breakaway republic of T.A.R.G.E.T had already announced that it would allow A.P.P.L.E forces a base in its app.

“App and pay,” Bond reflected, “is more important than tap and pay in the long run. M.C.X might never regain the strategic heights. I don’t understand why they jumbled together their new payment system and their new mobile QR code app.”

Given the panic, Bond decided to lay low for a day or two, so he moved out of the Aria and went off the Paris. His heart sank as he walked through the door. The line to register was an hour long! Bond stood wondering whether to miss the Money2020 Pool Party that he had been looking forward to. Out of nowhere, N. appeared at the head of the queue. Bond noticed him flash a small piece of black plastic at the clerk, and as if by magic a new line was opened, just for N. Even Bond was impressed.

The only card he had with him was that driving licence that S. had given him. He flashed at it the clerk. Nothing. Bond put it away quickly. Odd. It normally worked.

“I wonder if it’s a forgery?” he thought to himself, and began to wonder what might be a quick and efficient way to find out. And then it came to him. Via a connection, Bond sent a message to the Israelis. Back came an invitation: Starbucks at 3pm.

“Good idea”, Bond said to himself. No-one will expect a top secret meeting 

They were there at three on the dot, milling around in the crowd. Bond put his driving licence on the table and took a photo of it, and mailed to the AU10TIX operative opposite.

“Let me know”, Bond whispered, and turned back to his latte.

A couple of hours later the message came through. “It’s real”, they said. “We’ve done detailed image analysis to look for alterations and found none, so we can ran data extraction algorithms to get the details. They all match up.” 

Just when Bond was feeling on top of things again, bad news arrived from the boss. “There’s been a security breach”, said G., “and I thought you’d want to know right away”. Bond glanced down at his phone: there was a message from the service, pointing out a tweet that the big data analysis Watson-style supercomputer had picked up earlier:

Prior to meeting @dgwbirch, I thought all Brits were like James Bond. Mtg him confirmed that. I was wrong?

— rshevlin (@rshevlin) November 5, 2014

G. was on Wickr in an instant. “Take him out”, she said without a hint of emotion.

Bond was ahead of her. He was already planning an invitation to Shevlin. A meeting at his favourite place in Boston, Post 390. Clam chowder, the best crab cakes in the city… and a dash of Polonium.

[Final Chapter! Part 11: Licence to Bill]

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 “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” (ISIL) are apparently about to issue their own currency based on precious metals. But surely it’s time for digital dinars isn’t it? I mean come on, just how conservative are these guys?

Seven years ago, I wrote a blog post that mentioned some comments from Ben Steil, then Director of International Economics at the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) who had said that Governments  “must let go of the fatal notion that nationhood requires them to make and control the money used in their territory” and that “in order to globalise safely, countries should abandon monetary nationalism and abolish unwanted currencies, the source of much of today’s instability”. As I said at the time, that’s what I call thinking out of the box. Ben is, I suspect, of conservative bent, as he also said that:

As radical and implausible as it may sound, digitising the earth’s 2,500-year experiment with commodity money may ultimately prove far more sustainable than our recent 35-year experiment with monetary sovereignty.

[From Gold opportunity]

Let’s return to Ben’s comments in a moment but first look at the concept of supra-national money — money that is not connected with national borders — through a conservative lens. The European Union is an obvious case study, where the conservative perspective might be that the currency can be argued to be failing, but there is another supra-national trading bloc of interest at the moment, the new Caliphate. They are not using the euro, but the spawn of the Great Satan.

“In order to remain anonymous, ISIL may most likely be settling transactions for smuggled oil in U.S. dollars or the local currency of a cash-intensive economy,”

[From Islamic State to Mint Gold Coins – MoneyBeat – WSJ]

The local currency of every “cash-intensive economy” is nine times out of ten the US Dollar as far as I know, so you can’t help but wonder why on Earth US regulators are chasing their tails on Bitcoin when it is actually US Federal Reserve banknotes that are wreaking havoc wherever they go? I noted in an article about corruption in Afghanistan that

Washington made the problem worse by inundating Afghanistan with more cash than it could absorb in legitimate channels to undertake needed reforms;

[From Joint Chiefs report admits U.S. military made Afghanistan’s corruption worse: Graft, not the Taliban, defeated the U.S. campaign.]

In a newspaper story like this, “cash” is usually a simple word inserted to mean money of a variety of forms (bank-created credit, central bank-issued currency and so on). But in that particular case, when they said “cash” they meant it absolutely literally. Flipping great wodges of Yankee dollars. I wrote about this several years ago.

Interestingly, when he says “bags of cash” he isn’t speaking metaphorically: they actually do give him bags of cash

[From Cash means a lot of baggage – Tomorrow’s Transactions]

All of which leaves me wondering why the US chose to work in cash. M-PAISA went live in Afghanistan years ago, and the US could (I’m pretty sure) have simply insisted that all contractors were paid by mobile money so that they had a rudimentary audit trail as, indeed, they would have with Bitcoin. But I digress. Back to the Caliphate. Remember my new tattoo, “cuius regio, eius pecunia” or “whose region, his money”? It turns out that it’s their motto too and as they appear be of a reactionary mindset, the money in their region will not be of the kind subject to quantitative easing.

The “Treasury Department” of the jihadist group that is now occupying large portions of Syria and Iraq announced Thursday that it plans to mint its own currency out of gold, silver and copper.

[From Islamic State to Mint Gold Coins – MoneyBeat – WSJ]

The group say that their goal is to break away from the “satanic usury-based global economic system”, and I’m sure we’d all support them in this noble aim. Hence their desire to 

use a currency that’s “based on the inherent value of the metals”

[From Islamic State to Mint Gold Coins – MoneyBeat – WSJ]

They sound as conservative as Ben and in their declaration I hear a faint mimetic echo of my “back to the future” theory on the impact of new technology on money. But I’m not as conservative as them in every respect, hence I can’t help but ask: why bother minting coins or notes at all? As I suggested in the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum, 

As I will say in Edinburgh tonight, there is no need for notes and coins (except as post-functional cash) and Consult Hyperion’s experiences ranging from chip and PIN to M-PESA and from Mondex to MPOS  can help the new Scottish government to design and build money for the 21st century while remembering the 19th!

[From McPESA]

What’s wrong with an Islamic Au-PESA? On hearing news of the new currency, incidentally, I turned immediately to my copy of “A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire” by Sevket Pamuk of the LSE to look for suggestions for the denominations, names and styling of the new coins. In case you are wondering why I have a  “A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire” by Sevket Pamuk in reach on my bookshelf, it’s because a couple of years ago I did some work for a financial services customer who was thinking of launching (in essence) an Islamic payment card. The idea was to have an account something like e-gold but with a decoupled debit card front-ending it. So, you go into Harrods and spend $X, it looks to Harrods like a debit transaction in the £ but it is actually an F/X transaction that is converted to Y grams of gold on your account. Thus, you have can a Gold Card that actually uses gold.

This is not to imply, incidentally, that digital gold is just for the Islamic community or that gold is the only commodity that may be used as a store of value. It may well be that digitised commodity money is in the future for all of us.

[From Gold opportunity]

I remember the feasibility study being quite positive, but the customer decided not to go ahead for other reasons. Maybe it’s time to dust off the idea again and launch an Islamic e-Dinar electronic money issuing institution with gold as the unit of account and a gold 100% reserve. What’s wrong with a little competition in currency?

And finally, if the Treasury Department of the Caliphate is looking for an inspirational figure to show them a vision of how life could be, I suggest that they strike their first new Dinar with the head of Alec Baldwin on it.

Back to the future, guys.

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.

Undercover at Money2020, our man in Las Vegas ls lost in booths, babes and benjamins. But can agent 0111 stop a killer new technology from falling into the wrong hands? It’s Main Street vs Infinite Loop in the major new blogbuster from CHYP End… welcome to… Pay Another Day

Part 9: For Your iPhones Only

Bond had sent word back to S. asking for emergency support as soon as he’d got up. He’s sent an urgent telegram by e-mail to Miss Moneysatoshi and asked her to take it to S. as soon as he arrived in the building.

“HELP. HAVE ACCIDENTALLY AGREED TO GIVE KEYNOTE TALK STOP. THE IMPACT OF APPLEPAY ON OTHER ECOSYSTEMS STOP. NEED PLAUSIBLE 30 MINUTE SPEECH. STOP.”

S. and the first floor boffins did not disappoint. The message from S. came through just as Bond walked through the door of the Mandarin Oriental. Apparently, the big brains at Consult Hyperion had been asked to prepare a report on HCE and Tokenisation for the GSMA and it was already in Bond’s in-box. 

Bond pulled it up, grabbed a few strips of crispy bacon and a coffee, and was delighted to discover that the report was so well-written, so clear and accessible, so insightful, that by the time he stood at the lectern he knew exactly what he was going to say. 

He began by explaining that because of the ApplePay architecture, which endorsed the hardware secure element (SE) and local authentication against a revocable token as a the chosen platform, the advance of tokenisation services would be swift. While the banks were currently using network tokenisation platforms, some would move to in-house and others to third-party services so a market would develop. This, in turn, reduced the marginal cost of applying tokens to other implementations and this, in turn, re-invigorated HCE. Tokens with appropriate token constraints set were a cost-effective way of bring standard payments to other platforms whether they had SE or not.

It went well.

He pulled it off.

Mission accomplished, Bond set off for the exhibition floor to see if he could pick up any intelligence from the buzz around the myriad vendors. At one point, he saw a few Hare Bitcoiners in the distance, so he slipped behind a curtain to avoid them. While he was there, he realised he could overhear a conversation from around the corner. He couldn’t tell who was speaking, or indeed what they were speaking about (something to do with Stella forking Rippled, but he had no idea who Stella was or whether the Rippled chap was one of us or not). But then he heard the distinctive voice of a Venture Capitalist chime in.

“Don’t let them know”, the VC said in a sinister drawl, “but we don’t care about their stupid play money pretend currency. Let them have fun with that. We want control of the blockchain.”

The blockchain? What was the blockchain? It must be something that A.P.P.L.E or M.C.X were working on, but then Bond heard another man.

“If we can move to an open, distributed, public ledger for digital assets, it will transform society let alone commerce. No-one will be able to control it. No-one”.

No-one? Not Facebook or Google or Amazon or Microsoft or A.P.P.L.E or anyone else? No-one? This sounded like information he needed to get back to the bods upstairs right away. Bond took out his Moleskine and was about to make notes but at that exact point, the curtain opened a crack and he was temporarily distracted by the free Haagen Dazs, and when he turned back, the men were gone. So he went back for another coffee almond crunch and resolved to make his way through the crowd and go to a session.

Flashing smile at the woman on the door, Bond strode through into a payments cavern. A room of 1000 people, listening to a distant panel discussion, only visible because of the enormous monitor hovering above the stage. Bond was looking at the panel, he was looking at the crowd. He was looking for the furtive glance, the shielded exchange of business cards, the scribbled note passed in a flash that would alert into agents at work. This was their natural habitat, after all.

Bond glanced back up at the stage. The panel seemed a little unusual to him, you didn’t see many of these, after all. There was a middle-aged man in a suit and he was talking to for other middle-aged men in suits. Bond’s slunk towards a corner, hiding in plain sight, his mind racing. A panel like this sticks out like a sore thumb so it must mean something. But what? Some kind of signal?

The men were all talking about NFC and how it was going to transform the customer experience because tap-and-pay is easy and quick and secure. But this was old news. Bond tried to read between the lines. But all he saw were the lines. 

[Part 10: Bitfinger]

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.

Undercover at Money2020, our man in Las Vegas ls lost in booths, babes and benjamins. But can agent 0111 stop a killer new technology from falling into the wrong hands? It’s Main Street vs Infinite Loop in the major new blogbuster from CHYP End… welcome to… Pay Another Day

Part 8: Live and Let Tap

Bond set off for a walk. He hadn’t gone a hundred yards before he path was blocked by a pair of ice-cool blondes who asked him what he was drinking. “Gin and tonic” he said, extending his hand. And then he tried his new standard opening move. “Didn’t I see you at the Woman 2.0 reception?”.

After a couple of stiff ones, it all got a little blurry. When Bond’s head cleared, the ice-cool blondes had vanished. Bond needed to rethink. He decided to try a different tack and, going back to his basic training (Miller Heimann training, that is) came up with a simple plan. He would try to pass himself off as a harmless idiot and hide in plain sight in the teeming throng. So, he mused, what would an idiot do in Las Vegas after a few drinks? As he stood under the Fremont Street canopy, tapping his feet to the thumping cover of Pitbull’s “Timber”, he saw the answer. Of course! A tattoo!

But what? Bond thought carefully. It would have to be something about money, because if there were any tattoos on the delegates at the Aria, they would definitely be about money. And it should be something about the future of money. Bond had read Birch’s indispensable guidebook to the future “Identity is the New Money” while back in the UK, so he knew that the future of money was somehow tied to communities. Not necessarily those based on geographic regions, but also those based in regions of virtual space, where members of communities with shared values might use new technology to create currencies that incorporated those values. Bond smiled. He had the perfect motto. Now all he had to do was remember his Latin from the Lower Sixth.

Cuis regio, euis pecunia.

Literally, it means “whose region, his money”. In the context of the technology-fuelled speculation of the Aria crowd, though, it is also a witty comment on the relationship between regulation and currency. With that, Bond was sure, he would fit right in.

Bond woke up the next morning with a hangover and a headache. The hangover was because of the cheap gin that the ice-cool blondes had been plying him with, the headache was because he remembered that he done two really, really stupid things while drunk. First, he’d got that damn tattoo. Second, he had agreed to talk at the ice-cool blonde’s Workshop on Digital Commerce at the Mandarin Oriental at 9am. He stayed in bed for a few moments, watching the sunshine play along his arm, watching the dust motes rising from the warming sheets, watching the alarm clock tick towards 7am.

The walk in the fresh morning air had actually done him a lot of good. As he strolled along in front of the casino, he couldn’t help but think how wrong everyone had been a couple of years ago, when it had been fashionable to think that the ruthless command-and-control world of A.P.P.L.E could not compete with the capitalist innovate-and-compete world of M.C.X. Sooner or later, we’d all thought, A.P.P.L.E would have to tear down its walled garden and deliver freedom to the fanboys trapped with their iTunes libraries on the wrong side of history. But it hadn’t worked like that. President Cook of M.C.X could guide the warring factions but he couldn’t compel them to doing anything. On the other hand, Chief of the Politburo Cook of A.P.P.L.E could order his massed legions to do anything. Anything at all.

Bond took a deep breath and walked into the workshop.

[Part 9: For Your iPhones Only]

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.

Undercover at Money2020, our man in Las Vegas ls lost in booths, babes and benjamins. But can agent 0111 stop a killer new technology from falling into the wrong hands? It’s Main Street vs Infinite Loop in the major new blogbuster from CHYP End… welcome to… Pay Another Day

Part 7: You Only Pay Twice

Bond strode confidently through the door of the two-floor suite on the 58th floor, taking in the breathtaking view of Vegas, the three burly security guys, the bar at the far end of the room and the crowd in one measured, experienced glance.  The boys in the back room had hacked into Tom Noyes’ PC and edited his Excel spreadsheet of top payments bods to add @dgwbirch’s name, so he was now on the guest list.

As Bond circulated, mixing with the payments high and mighty, he kept his payments sixth sense turned up to 11. If they were going to be anywhere, the agents of A.P.P.L.E and M.C.X were going to be here. This was where the power was and if anyone doubted it, they need only look at the fine figure of a man blocking Bond’s way.

The noble gait, the piercing intelligence, the handsome visage and the steely glare of a determined and successful payments executive could only be explained by one thing: this was a man who had bought “Identity is the New Money” at the full retail price and read it from cover to cover. Bond didn’t need to check this man’s bag out: he knew he’d find a well-thumbed copy there.

Bond was looking some of throng up on his smart phone when mein host Tom Noyes walked over to him. Bond acted quicky, and made it look as if he was taking a selfie. He had read about them in The Telegraph recently and knew they were all the rage. So he smiled at the nearest CEO, Ted from Kik Messenger, held up the camera and snapped. It was only when he looked at the picture later that he realised that the mysteriously missing Rodger Desai was in the picture behind them! What on Earth was going on? How had Desai got past security? What was he up to? Bond began to realise that the picture was more complicated than G. and her masters suspected.

Standing at the bar with a fresh gin and tonic in his hand, puzzling over the clues he had accumulated, Bond began to scan the assembled luminaries. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, he was just looking for any little clue as to the power structures behind the scenes. He was distracted for a moment by a beautiful woman who emerged from the crowd. Bond nodded to her.

“Didn’t I see you at the Woman 2.0 reception?” he ventured, but she wasn’t buying it.

She turned to a companion and began talking about San Francisco. Ah, he thought, San Francisco. For a moment he was transported to the city by the bay, remembering the lazy days and busy nights he had spent there.  Snapping out of his daydream he scanned the room again. Nothing. He set out to circulate, and kept up the small talk, using some of the phrases he had picked up during the day.

“It’s not about payment, it’s about the value-added services around the payment” he told David Sears from Skrill.

“Well, for the big merchants it’s not about tap-and-pay it’s about app-and-pay” he told Osama Bedier from Poynt.

Then…

“Did you see Tom’s panel? When President Cook asked that question to the Commander-in-Chief of Visa?” he heard a man somewhere behind him say.

“Oh man”, said the second voice. “He was tough”

“Really?” the first man mused. “I’m not so sure. We had some of our top analysts go through that in slow-motion, and that’s not what they thought. We’ve got one or two people who are fluent in Walmartese, and their interpretation was a little different from the standard translation. They think that Cook is thinking about a future cease-fire agreement with A.P.P.L.E and asking the networks to give lower rates for in-app purchases.”

At that moment, a slim man dressed in a natty jumper walked passed, and in a lilting and strangely comforting voice, addressed both of them.

“Card-Present and Card-Not-Present are outdated concepts. They have no place in the modern age. We must replace them with Cardholder-Present and Cardholder-Not-Present” he said, an expression of calm enlightenment draped over his youthful features.

A.P.P.L.E were here. Bond gasped. They had penetrated to the very highest level of the Aria. Nowhere was safe.

Bond followed the young man to the bottom of the staircase.

“I know why you’re here”, said Bond, “and you’re not going to get away with it. You’re not going to control all of commerce. I don’t fall for your ‘easy payment’ waffle. I know it’s just a trojan horse for your wallet play: loyalty, coupons and — if you have your dastardly way — identity.”

The young man stared at him, impassive throughout.

Bond mused for a moment, and then tried another tack.

“Were the end of CP/CNP rules and rates for SE-based in-app tokenised payments part of the negotiations between A.P.P.L.E and the banks?”

Another voice from behind…

“There were no negotiations, Mr. Bond. And there will be no negotiations with you either, unless you sign this NDA.”

Bond turned and ran for his life. He knew that signing an A.P.P.L.E NDA would mean a lifetime of servitude, so he ran. He ran out into the corridor and down to the elevator bank. Ahead of him he saw the suave figure of Peter Burridge, arm-in-arm with the woman Bond had spoken to earlier. Bond slowed, walked ahead of them and held the elevator open until they were both inside.

The door closed and he pressed the button for the lobby with a visceral sense of relief, the adrenaline draining from his system. It looked as if the mobile wallet was already in A.P.P.L.E hands. M.C.X would have to use the nuclear option.

[Part 8: Live and Let Tap]

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.

Undercover at Money2020, our man in Las Vegas ls lost in booths, babes and benjamins. But can agent 0111 stop a killer new technology from falling into the wrong hands? It’s Main Street vs Infinite Loop in the major new blogbuster from CHYP End… welcome to… Pay Another Day

Part 6: Dr. NoAuth

“Oh come on G. For goodness sake! How am I supposed to get into the Women 2.0 reception? It’s just not possible. I suppose you want me to shave my legs and wear a cocktail dress?”

G. was insistent. “It’s important. We need to know if Women 2.0 is an Illuminati front or a genuine attempt to recruit and retain woman in the payments workforce.”

He was adamant. “I’m not doing it G., I’m not. Dash it all, there are some places where a chap just does not go, like IKEA on a Sunday”.

G. smiled. “Come on James. You’ll find a way.”

Bond set off for the bar trying to think of a plausible way to make it up to the 38th floor. There was no way past the guard at the entrance to the elevator is and he didn’t think you’d be able to scale the outside of the building without being noticed, so out of ideas he went to the lobby bar to think. Walking in, he quickly scanned the throng, looking for the kind of powerful woman he would need to help pull this one off. He saw her sitting on a white sofa and in one movement glanced at the passing waiter and slid down onto the comfortable leather. He put out a hand.

“Birch, Dave Birch”.

She reached out a hand in response.

“Realini, Carol Realini.”

Twenty minutes later he was riding up to the 38th floor as her date.

Bond wasn’t quite sure to expect as he walked through the door. He hadn’t really given it much thought, but he wasn’t that keen on spending a couple of hours talking about breastfeeding rooms and freezing eggs when he could have been playing Blackjack downstairs. When he went in, though, it turned out that they were talking about empowering women entrepreneurs. That gave him an idea…

After listening to the talk, Bond went next door to get something to eat. With gin and tonic in hand he made small talk until the buzz from his phone signalled a text message. He glanced down. The biometrics expert had arrived and he needed to talk to her so he invited her up, thinking that as she was a) a woman and b) an entrepreneur, she would provide him with the perfect cover.

Bond broke out a genuine smile as his old friend Max came in.

“Hey Max. Great to see you. How have you been keeping?”

They found a quite corner and Max explained to him all about fingerprint sensors and false accept rates and false reject rates and crossover curves and sensitivity and reproduction and the difference between matching templates and searching databases for approximate collisions. As she talked, Bond began to realise the different between identification and authentication, and he began to think about what that might mean in a retail payments context. The fog cleared.

“Ah.” said James, picking up the implications of what Max was saying. She was saying that the A.P.P.L.E fingerprint system looked as if it was something to do with security, but was really to do with convenience. It was the two-factor authentication with the device that was the key, and it didn’t really matter if you used a fingerprint or a PIN or something else.

 So A.P.P.L.E had stumbled on a configuration that delivered the right balance of factors. Strong local authentication against a secure biometric template linked to a revocable token stored in tamper-resistant hardware. You had to give it to those Cupertino wallahs. They knew what consumers wanted, which was lucky because banks didn’t (and neither did the consumers, for that matter).

[Part 7: You Only Pay Twice]

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.

Undercover at Money2020, our man in Las Vegas ls lost in booths, babes and benjamins. But can agent 0111 stop a killer new technology from falling into the wrong hands? It’s Main Street vs Infinite Loop in the major new blogbuster from CHYP End… welcome to… Pay Another Day

Part 5. The Man with the Golden iWatch

As Bond walked around the corner, he realised something was wrong. Very wrong. Not only was he up and about at 7 in the morning, but out of the corner of his eye he saw man walking towards him with a fixed grin and a psychopathic stare. He looked like a KAOS killer.

That wasn’t Rodger Desai! Bond had studied Rodger’s file — well, LinkedIn profile — before heading over to the MGM. So that was why he’d been missing from the Illuminati dinner. They had him. But who were they? A.P.P.L.E? M.C.X? One of the Far Eastern groups? Some splinter group hoping to exploit Rodger’s considerable lead in using mobile phone data support device-based authentication?

Bond darted into the milling crowd and let himself get carried along by the bustle. He fell into a river of people that carried him through the doors and into the main conference room, where a few thousand of the faithful were waiting to hear from the Reverend Weiner and some of his powerful friends. Bond slid sideways, making sure he wasn’t being followed, and walked to an empty chair near the front, in the light, where he could clearly see any movement in either aisle. Just as he sat down, a couple of Powerpoint jockeys from McKinsey, which is a management consultancy, said that there were six key themes to the event this year: POS evolution, security, cryptocurrency, credit models, globalisation and partnerships. Putting the last two to one side because he could imagine what they might mean in general terms, Bond had no idea what they were talking about, but nodded sagely like the rest of the audience around him.

Just then, saw a flicker of movement in the corner of the room. A shadow slipped out of a side door: Bond was on his feet in two or three minutes and out into the corridor. He went down an escalator and found himself in a vast exhibition hall, where vendors from around the world were exhibiting all manner of products and services. Then he saw him, sitting in a far corner and trying to look inconspicuous, was the cat-burgler Bond was sure he had seen upstairs. Blocking the man’s exit, Bond knelt and pretended to tie his shoelace.

“Who are you working for, friend?”

Nothing. The intruder remained impassive. Bond moved closer.

“Listen to me. I don’t care who you are working for, A.P.P.L.E or M.C.X or anyone else, let me give you a message to take back to your head honcho. We know that the mobile wallet is real, and I’m going to make sure that people know all about it. So if you, or anyone else, thinks that they can keep it to themselves, they are dead wrong. Our view of the national interest is clear: we need a balance of power and competition. If either side gets total control of the mobile wallet, the potential for abuse is too great. Do you understand?”

Nothing. The man in black refused to say a thing, and Bond thought it better not to waterboard him in daylight, so he stood up to think. Perhaps he should make his way back up to the keynote session before he was missed.

Bond settled back down again. A chap from Visa was talking about a new approach to partnership and co-operation, opening up the “edge of the network” through APIs. It all sounded jolly good to Bond. There was something that puzzled him though. At the Aria hotel, where this Money2020 was being held, and where all of these people were supposed experts in retail payments, there were no contactless terminals so no-one could tap their phones to pay, no in-app payments so no ApplePay or Google Wallet, no chip-and-PIN terminals, and you had to produce photo ID to buy a coffee as well as a drink at the paper. The staff gave you pieces of paper to sign when you bought something. Bond didn’t know what you were supposed to write on the paper, and he didn’t want to ask anyone, so he just chose an exotic sounding name and wrote that each time. Sergio Aquero, Bruno Zuculini, Pablo Zabaletta, Willy Caballero, Martin Demichelis. No-one seemed to care.

This apparent paradox — of supposed payment experts who he never saw using either “tap and pay” or “app and pay” — was still nagging at the back of his brain when a strange thing happened. A pair of rich white men (who looked so similar they might be twins) came out on stage and started talking about people bartering fish for goats — or something along those lines — 10,000 years ago. Bond was absolutely baffled. This was obviously some weird ritual that the boys back home hadn’t seen coming. He glanced left and right to see how to respond, but all around him people were get up and leaving, which struck him as dashed rude of them. A gentleman, Bond thought, should always sit and listen to another gentleman’s talk, even if it is all guff.

[Part 6: Dr. NoAuth]

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.