[Dave Birch] It’s a tenuous link to identity, but I thought readers might be curious about an initiative launched by the British government last week. Apparently we have a Minister for Crime Reduction and said minister (Mr. Vernon Coaker) has begun “new moves to break the link between mobile phones and crime” with a workshop where key players from the mobile phone industry — such as manufacturers, networks, academics and law enforcement — were challenged to imagine how the multi-functional handsets of the future can be redesigned to be less tempting and less useful to thieves and criminals. Amongst other objectives, the minister wants to know “what can be done to prevent criminals using phones to facilitate crime”. There’s nothing like aiming high.

My idea (patent pending) is that when you want to make a phone call, you have to punch in your national identity number first. Then, the phone company will check with the government to see if you are a criminal, and if you’re not then an IVR will ask you to clearly state whether the call you are going to make is for criminal purposes. If you say “no”, you’ll get a dial tone. If you say “yes”, then you will be sent a text message asking you to proceed to your nearest police station — during office hours only — and turn yourself in.

Technorati Tags: fraud, mobile, security

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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] Steve Mott, whose opinions I always value, wrote an article arguing that so far as US payment cards are concerned, security went wrong many years ago when the industry decided not to go to PIN. Of course, outside the US the migration to “chip &PIN” is steady if not spectacular. But it’s not making a big difference overall, because fraud is migrating to remote channels. He says this is testing” the resources and will of an industry still reluctant to abandon the gravy train of fees and interchange to commit to safer, better, and cheaper alternative payments”. He goes on to point out that the spends about a dollar in prevention for every $10 they lose in fraud, which he compares to the health care industry that has three times as much fraud but spends less than tenth as much on fraud prevention. My reaction to reading this was to think how the payment card industry might spend its anti-fraud budgets more effectively, but I don’t think that was the main point. The main point was that we’re not doing very well against fraud at a time when we’re introducing contactless payments and trying to shift transactions online. Perhaps one of the reasons is that by offering zero liability to consumers — no matter how reckless they might be — “a generation of consumers has been trained to disregard safe practices for use of financial accounts”. Steve says that…

it’s time to throw out the blanket zero-liability paradigm and get legitimate, responsible consumers to put some skin in the security game, too. The good ones appear to be ready to do what’s needed to protect themselves. Consumers who can’t should get restricted account access. Those who won’t should bear the specific costs of their misbehavior instead of loading their burden on the backs of the vast majority of responsible transactors.

Interesting, and different to my plan to make it the both the issuers and customers problem by changing the law so it’s not illegal to use someone else’s card. My plan delivers zero fraud, instantly.

Technorati Tags: credit cards, debit cards, fraud, payments, retail

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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] Why are we all so interested in Japanese e-money statistics? Setting aside that when I say “we”, I of course mean “me”, it’s because of the clues it may contain to the evolution of electronic money in a rich mobile-centric environment. According to the Nomura Research Institutethe Japanese e-money market grew from 180 billion yen in 2006 to 690 billion yen in 2007, including EDY’s 100 billion yen share and Suica’s 50 billion yen share. The market is expected to be worth 2.8 trillion yen in 2011. With the spread of e-money, concerns have been raised that the money supply –one of the elements that the Bank of Japan uses to map out its monetary policy — may not reflect the actual state of the economy, as the money supply data does not include e-money (and nor, I suspect, does anyone else’s, although I’d love to hear from anyone who can prove me wrong).

Technorati Tags: e-purse, mobile

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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.