[Jane Adams] As a journalist, I’m all too familiar with the nasty feeling that you don’t quite understand what you are writing about. Most of the time it works out OK. Not so, sadly, for the retail correspondent of the Observer last weekend in his article on Visa contactless payments.

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[Dave Birch] It is the 40th anniversary (is that Ruby?) of the launch of the credit card in the UK. On 29th June 1966, the first one million Barclaycards were issued by Barclays Bank to selected customers. Barclaycard had the market to themselves for six years, as it wasn’t until 1972 that Access (remember “your flexible friend“) was launched by Lloyds, NatWest and Midland. Oddly, I still have my diary for 1972 and it makes no mention of the fact (although it does mention just how many times I played “All the Young Dudes” by “Mott the Hoople” on my cassette player (which I do remember extremely well: I loved it, but it ate batteries).

It was far from obvious, in those days, that credit cards were going to be so successful (there is £56 billion outstanding on consumer credit cards in the UK today). As late as 1970, the Nilson Report said in its third issue “The heyday of bank card profits may be over as officials begin to wonder if there will ever be such a thing as profits”. By coincidence, I was reading Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets” over the weekend and this reminded of Yogi Berra‘s famous paraphrase of the wisdom of Solon (a Greek visitor to the court of the fabulously wealthy Croesus, King of Lydia and one of the fathers of money — he was responsible for the minting of the first pure metal coins): it ain’t over till it’s over.

Technorati Tags: ATM, credit cards

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[Dave Birch] A big thank you to Brian Derman from our friends at Glenbrook for posting his interesting reflections from the UBS Payments Conference in New York earlier this month. One section I thought particularly interesting, and have been thinking about, was the “fireside chat” with Elizabeth Buse, EVP of Product Management at Visa USA. Brian comments: “Within the constraints imposed by her attorneys, I felt Ms. Buse made a solid case for the continued success of Visa in the US”.

Brian noted one of her comments that “the biggest worry for the growth of Visa is not MasterCard, American Express, the ACH, or any other payment system; it is the continued confidence of consumers and merchants in the security of the system, which has obviously been shaken by recent breaches.”

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch]  It’s not particularly surprising that you can get into the Department of Homeland Security with a fake Mexican ID (address "123 Fraud Blvd").  No-one ever looks at IDs properly, so it doesn’t matter what you put on them.  In any case, how would someone know whether a Mexican ID card is valid or not?  You need tamper-resistant chips and digital signatures to do this properly, not pictures and receptionists.

Technorati Tags: biometrics, ID cards

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

Here’s some face recognition fun.  There’s a site called riya.com that I’ve been playing with.  Basically, you upload photos to the site a bit like Flickr except the site runs face recognition software: it picks faces out of the photos: you label them (eg, Dad).  Then you can upload more photos and search for "Dad": the software performs face recognition on the photos you’ve uploaded.  It didn’t work perfectly, but I thought the fact that it worked at all was quite interesting.

Technorati Tags: biometrics, internet

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch] There’s a new digital money podcast up: I’m talking to Will Judge, the Director of E-Money at Transport for London.

Technorati Tags: contactless, e-purse, travel

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch] There’s a great story in the news today. It had never occurred to me that Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) had an inventor. But they did. And in a great tradition of financial innovation — including current accounts and overdrafts — he was Scottish. And in the Queen’s birthday honour’s list, James Goodfellow (69) who lives in Paisley in Renfrewshire has been awarded an OBE. He devised the mechanism of keying in a number code to cash machines in the 1966.

Technorati Tags: ATM, banking, cash

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Jane Adams] Would the gentleman who emailed me last week with information about his blog please resend the email. I’ve been being extremely ruthless with my email inbox and I got a little carried away…

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] It’s truly amazing what google can deliver. While searching for something else, I found out all about Mondex, 3D authentication and many other things… “Mondex” seems to be short for “monetary dexterity.” While “dexterity” means “easy handling,” the dictionary definition of “dexter” is “right hand” or “right side.” Therefore, the term “Mondex” could very well have been chosen to depict “money in the right hand”!!

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.