[Dave Birch] Consult Hyperion has been providing some pro-bono consultancy support to Comic Relief. For those of you who do not live in the UK, let me just say that comic relief is one of the most important and recognised charitable organisations in the country. Their 2013 “red nose Day” campaign raced almost £100 million for a variety of good causes. As part of our work for them, we helped organise a technology forum meeting between Intellect, the U.K.’s technology industry trade body, and the Payments Council around the specific topic of charitable giving and, in particular, the issue of gift aid. I just need to explain why before I talk about the event.

Charitable giving and the issue of “third sector” payments probably doesn’t get the attention it deserves from the financial services side. Charities have particular and in some cases unusual requirements around payments but most of them share a desire to make the process of giving frictionless and painless. For that reason, Comic Relief and other charities are very interested in a variety of emerging payments options out there and especially interested in the opportunities around the mobile. But there’s a particular issue around charitable giving in the UK because of the thing called “gift aid”. When UK taxpayers donate to charity, the charity can claim tax relief at the basic rate. So if I give a pound to charity the charity will actually get £1.20 provided that they can show to the tax authorities that I am indeed a UK taxpayer and that I paid more than 20p in tax last year.

It occurred to me, and other people too, that if some of the new payment systems under design right now could be “nudged” to deal with this particular requirement of the charity sector, including gift aid in their design somehow, then we (i.e., the payments industry) would have a genuine win-win to be proud of. For a relatively small cost we could generate a lot of additional money for charities. The Payments Council have been extremely supportive of this idea and I hope I won’t embarrass Miles Cheetham by singling him out as having done a terrific job in talking to the stakeholders — including Unicef, Verizon and� Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) — to open up the conversations. There has been real and significant progress at that level. Example: the HMRC “proposal 4” on digital platforms would allow for organisations to remember gift aid declarations. Therefore one might imagine Braintree style back-end payments integration which matched the proffered identity and the device to attributes on file to bundle the donation, the declaration and the personal details in an appropriate form (i.e. in a usable open data format for customers so that they can generate one simple report to fill out tax return at the end of the year and as PDFs on a CD for posting to the HMRC).

So to the technology forum. After an initial talk by Amanda Horton-Mastin, the Innovation Director at Comic Relief, we broke up into smaller groups to discuss the problem from different directions and come up with some ideas and we then reassembled to share the ideas in the traditional fashion.

My preferred solution would be to either add gift aid eligibility as an attribute to a financial services identity (but since no one is listening to my idea about a “money name” I think we will call that Plan B) or to create some sort of “charity name”. So just as my twitter name is at @dgwbirch and my Facebook name is [redacted] and my PayPal name is money@dgwbirch.com, so why couldn’t I create a charity name, say “»dgwbirch” and use that? We discussed a number of ideas around creating an infrastructural solution to support the immediate requirements of the M S (the (mobile front end to the Faster Payments Service), under development by Vocalink and PayForIt, the cross-industry direct-to-bill solution, but obviously any solution that we came up with would have to be available to other payment solutions. I should note that we had representatives from the “new” payments world (e.g., Paddle) as well as representatives from the mainstream at the meeting.

My take on all this is that it is an identity problem, not a payments problem. Therefore the right place to look for a solution is in the emerging identity sector and I rather bullied our group into agreeing that we should talk to the Governments approved identity providers (there are eight of them in the current IDA framework) to see if they might be able to provide a federated ID solution so that eligibility for gift aid could be determined automatically as part of the payment process. The idea of course is to stop requiring customers having to fill out gift aid declarations which in many cases they either don’t do or can’t do. A couple of the identity providers attended the meeting (Experian and PayPal) and I’m looking forward to seeing their feedback on some of the ideas that were raised.

Without stepping into more controversial territory, but in the interests of public understanding, I should flag up that the Payment Council’s previous attempt to build a bridge between the payments world and the identity world (what was then known as Project Gaia) didn’t get terribly far and so I think I sense a natural reluctance to want to dip a toe in that particular water again, but chatting to one or two people after the meeting I got the feeling that the time might be right to start work on the foundations of a new bridge. Identity has become such a problem (identity fraud is half of all fraud in the UK at the moment) that the need for a co-ordinated payments industry roadmap is now pressing.

I was very pleased to see that Miles had put up the suggestion of coordinating a discussion with the identity providers as one of the proposed next steps I have to say that I strongly support this idea and I hope to support to forthcoming discussions in a useful way.�

This is a terrific opportunity for the UK payments industry to do something really good with little effort and marginal cost. Many thanks to Intellect and the Payments Council and the payments organisations that came along for contributing to a worthwhile and productive set of discussions.

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’ve been reading an excellent new publication from the think tank Demos. It’s called “The Power of Prepaid” by Claudia Wood and Jo Salter. In essence their well-researched and interesting report recommends that the UK government extend the use of prepaid cards at both central government and local government levels to deliver social benefits more efficiently and more effectively. I wholeheartedly agree.

The heart of their argument is that prepaid card-based systems deliver more information to all of the stakeholders than cash does. Both the cardholder and the organisation managing the cards are able to view balance information on past transactions online. Spending can be monitored in real-time online which is important safeguarding benefits. The data coming back from cards on what and where people spend could be shooting valuable in a range of fields, and was certainly help researchers to better understand the “poverty premium” and the limited access to retail financial services mugs low income families.

But most importantly, Amex finally finally finally frames prepaid for what it should be, a checking account replacement, instead of a glorified gift-card.

[From Bluebird vs Greendot. Prepaid wins. – Forbes]

I couldn’t agree more. Prepaid cards have moved on a lot in recent years. Technology means that they can be given standing order and direct debit-like layers forming a sort of “bank account lite”. But we need still more functionality. There are a particular set of problems to do with subsidiary, companion and delegated cards which need to be addressed to overcome real problems in services for excluded groups. Quite often temporary fixes are found by adding companion cards (for carers, or dependents for example) but I think more generalised solutions, which would have to be connected in some way with some form of identity infrastructure, are what is really needed.

But back to the report. There’s no need for me to repeat all of the findings, as sure you want to read them for yourself, but I do want to highlight one or two things from the report, which makes some very sensible and reasoned recommendations that I suspect more than one of our clients will be able to respond to with new prepaid products and associated services.

The starting point for the report is that, excluding savings accounts which are not transactional in the sense that you cannot link them to a debit or credit card or pay benefits into them, the number of people without a current or basic account stands at more than 2.5 million in the UK today. (This excludes people who have bank account but for whom prepaid might be a better alternative). Therefore, the report recommends that the government address the problem of the unbanked by adopting fully functional chip and PIN prepaid cards. These cards can then be used for welfare and benefit payments of all kinds, and not only for the unbanked. The report says that the public sector should avoid the temptation to use simpler and less functional alternatives. They note that less functional cards keep the unbanked in a cash-based economy and that maintaining cash-based withdrawal systems using “one-dimensional” cards, the unbanked will not be to make the savings associated with shopping online, or pay bills direct debits, and so have a limited impact encouraging claimants into mainstream financial habits.

The authors say that people who were already using a prepaid card for social care direct payments spoke very positively about them when interviewed and they give a number of detailed case studies of existing schemes that I found very useful. I particularly liked the case of the Utah State card, delivered by JP Morgan Chase, which holds up to five separate pots of money on one card. This “jam jarring” of funds is a critical kind of functionality needed for the systems and not found in current implementations. When I interviewed Claudia for the podcast in our Tomorrow’s Transaction series I didn’t want to be a bore her with nerd interjections about this, but from reading the report I wasn’t sure if the authors were aware that it’s part of the EMV specification to allow multiple payment applications on the same card. The terminals have to implement this functionality there is no reason why a single card couldn’t be issued with say three or four payment applications on board each one storing a different pot of money. Thus, when the benefit recipient presents the card at a point-of-sale (POS) terminal they would be asked to select between different pots. As is discussed later in the report this will make it possible to have some pots restricted by merchant category code (MCC), or by time, or by terminal ID, or by velocity, or by maximum amount or whatever, and have other parts that are unrestricted. As an aside, one of the other learnings from the systems already in place was that councils experienced a high frequency of lost cards and/or lost PINs.

A particularly important thread in the report is the once concerning this issue of monitoring and control of card spending. The authors note that there might be benefits to using prepaid cards to deliver financial services to vulnerable groups and that we should begin a debate on balancing the complexities and ethics of safeguarding spending balanced against “nanny state” interference. (It was interesting to note the focus group participants tended to support the idea of other people having their benefits monitored, but not themselves.) Restrictions in the USA, like in the UK, are currently implemented by some blocking specific MCCs which identify types of shops. Since the card companies have no access to the level III POS data, nor would the retailers want them to, I don’t really see MCC blocking as a viable way forward, and as I’ve written before I’m sure it would have negative consequences as “legitimate goods” were traded away a discount for “illegitimate goods”.

I found some of their ideas about managing and restricting spending pots for rent purposes quite interesting — I would prefer a more radical solution, making it illegal to pay rents in cash at all — but there you go. Incidentally, and I don’t want to touch on politics of UK welfare payments, which are not the subject of this post, but the authors note in passing that when they interviewed people about the new universal credit shift to paying housing benefit to recipients rather than landlords, not a single person interviewed could see the benefit of doing so. Yet one of the reasons why the report is so timely is that the UK is about to undergo this transformation in the way that welfare benefits are paid.

The welfare system in the UK is switching to a new “universal credit” system where all benefits will be unified and paid monthly in arrears.

claimants will receive just one monthly payment, paid into a bank account in the same way as a monthly salary
[From Universal Credit – DWP]

If you’re wondering why our clients care about this, it’s because it represents a money flow of around £2 billion per month that is up for grabs.

[From Who wants low-cost bank accounts?]

They authors also recommend that the government create a targeted savings encouragement scheme. Our experiences down in Kenya would seem to support this conclusion. Simple savings products offered to the unbanked have tremendous social benefits, but that’s a subject for another post sometime.

Finally, I want to highlight that when the authors were talking about their areas for concern, the areas where the existing prepaid card infrastructure would ideally need to be improved to provide better solutions to the specific problems, I couldn’t help thinking that they were describing a kind of “Holvi for social care”: that is, a white-label payment institution that provides very specific and targeted functionality. Just as Holvi provides group accounts and the functionality that goes with them, you could imagine a similar system providing care accounts and the functionality that goes with them. I would have thought this might be a very fruitful area of investigation for the government and other stakeholder groups.

I thought the report’s conclusions and recommendations were excellent and make complete sense and I would only add additional recommendations around the use of communication channels — specifically mobile phones and digital television — to deliver budgeting and value-added management services around the prepaid cards. I think this is where we really could use new technology to make a difference. A prepaid account managed by mobile phone has greater utility and is far more powerful than a prepaid account managed just through a card.

Demos recommends that the government reviews its financial inclusion and digital inclusion activities and creates greater synergies between the two. I was very happy to read this, because we have been of a similar mind for some time. One or two of the projects that Consult Hyperion has been working on, including the current Technology Strategy Board project on using mobile and digital television to deliver financial services to socially excluded groups, have indicated precisely the same.

All in all, an excellent report and props to MasterCard for sponsoring it. In fact I was so interested in all of this that I have invited Claudia along to our Tomorrow’s Transactions Forum in March where she will present alongside the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) in a session designed to explore some of these issues in more detail. This is precisely the kind of area where some innovative use of new technology a little bit of out-of-the-box thinking about new services can intersect to bring about radical improvement, forming a genuine win-win for the government, the payments industry, taxpayers and benefit recipients.

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] A discussion earlier today touched on the British Government’s impending shift to “universal credit” in a reorganisation of the way that welfare benefits are paid. I saw in The Telegraph that the government was floating the suggestion that the payment systems be used to enforce moral judgements over the less well-off.

Iain Duncan Smith has asked his officials to see if so-called ‘problem’ families should receive their welfare payments on smart cards, rather than in cash.

[From 120,000 troubled families could be legally banned from spending benefits on alochol and tobacco – Telegraph]

The Daily Mail appears to have some more specific information on the design specifications for these new cards, which certainly seem to be using the very latest technology.

Plans being drawn up by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith will see the 120,000 problem families targeted with Oyster-style cards which can only be used in certain shops.

[From Iain Duncan Smith: ‘No booze’ smart cards for benefit claimants who spend their handouts on drugs and alcohol | Mail Online]

I’m not entirely sure what they mean by “Oyster-style” (Blue? Rectangular? Contactless? Not issued by a bank? A closed loop solution?) but I’m guessing that what they actually mean is pre-paid. Now, as far as I am concerned, this is actually a good way to deal with the transition to universal credit. Forcing banks to provide “basic bank accounts” that welfare recipients don’t want to use is a dead end. These accounts are a backward-looking, money-losing, non-solution to the problem of the underbanked. Allowing non-banks to provide pre-paid solutions (perhaps rather like the O2 Wallet, with smartphone management capabilities and a companion EMV card) is surely a better way forward.

Anyway, as far as I know, welfare recipients will be getting their cash on smart cards anyway. It may have slipped Mr. Smith’s mind, but starting next year all benefit recipients, let alone “problem families”, will be getting their welfare payments on smart cards since the new Universal Credit system means the end of welfare cheques, benefit books, Post Office cards and everything else. All benefits will be paid into bank accounts and to get them out you will need a debit card. In the UK, these have been smart for some time, as I’m sure Mr. Smith’s chauffeur could have told him. But perhaps it is the journalists who do not realise this? Perhaps what Mr. Smith has actually asked his officials to look into is selective Merchant Category Code (MCC) restrictions on pre-paid cards and debit cards issued with basic bank accounts?

I will happily stave off the demands on the public purse by telling Mr. Smith’s official’s management consultants that this is a waste of time. All it means is that benefit recipients will have to trade (inefficiently and at a discount) to get the booze, fags and weed. Given the entrepreneurial nature of the criminal underclass, a likely outcome would be the invention of an intermediate currency for the black economy (e.g., detergent bottles). Yet Mr. Smith appears to know this already, which makes his floating of the idea of payment system as policeman even more puzzling.

Mr Duncan Smith said he was against using a US-style food stamps system because they are often traded as a form of currency.

[From 120,000 troubled families could be legally banned from spending benefits on alochol and tobacco – Telegraph]

It’s not clear to me why he thinks that removing the physical medium of exchange would make any difference to the marketplace dynamics. Especially as the US experience has already proved this to be the case.

Complying with a law signed by President Obama in February may cost taxpayers more that it saves. That’s one conclusion of a white paper issued today by the Electronic Funds Transfer Association, which represents ATM networks and owners and processors, as well as financial institutions and state welfare agencies.

[From Preventing Welfare Clients from Using Their Benefits at “Vice” Locations May Be Costly and Ineffective, Announces Electronic Funds Transfer Association – pymnts.com]

if you ban welfare recipients from accessing ATMs at casinos, it just means that they go to the ATM at the gas station over the road from the casino and pay twice as much to get their money out. I’m sure there are a great many honest taxpayers who are upset at the idea of welfare recipients using their (i.e., the taxpayers) money to buy booze and would like them not to. But turning Visa and MasterCard into moral chaperones for every rendezvous between card and terminal isn’t a way to do that.

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] Once or twice I’ve had e-mails from people who say, to paraphrase, “you only hate cash because you work for electronic payment companies who would benefit from the end of cash”. This is partly true: Consult Hyperion, I’m proud to say, has been chosen by many of the world’s leading electronic payment companies to provide consultancy support and advice. But it is wrong to say that I only hate cash because of that. I hate cash for a variety of reasons and only some of them relate to boosting the business of our customers. There are moral reasons for hating cash too, and one of them is that it discriminates against that least well-off in society.

A group of development organisations, foundations and private companies, including Citi and Visa, have formed the ‘Better Than Cash Alliance’ to lobby for a shift towards electronic payments in the fight against global poverty. The alliance – comprising the UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), US Agency for International Development (USAID), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Citi, Ford Foundation, Omidyar Network, and Visa – is calling on governments, the development community and private sector to adopt the use of e-payments for programmes that support people living in poverty.

[From Finextra: ‘Better Than Cash Alliance’ to push e-payments in fight against poverty]

Now, this is a matter very close to my heart, so I can hardly be expected to be a dispassionate observer. As I have long maintained, the poor are the chief victims of cash. People trapped in a cash economy pay higher transactions costs, their money is lost and stolen, they lack access to basic financial services such as a savings and insurance and so on. So I am wholly in favour of this initiative. But what should its goal be? Generally speaking, in the US and the UK, insofar as the government has any policy toward financial inclusion it is based on bank accounts and starts with the observation that lots of people don’t have them.

About 8.2% of U.S. households, or nearly 10 million, lack a bank account, according to survey results released Wednesday by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. That’s up from 7.7%, or about 9 million households, in 2009

[From 10 million households don’t have bank accounts – Sep. 12, 2012]

This issue is wider than the unbanked, though. There are other categories of mismatch between the conventional banking products on offer in our economy and the needs of substantial fractions of the population. There are, for example, people who are underbanked, people who have some banking products but they don’t really use them or use the most appropriate ones.

By underbanked, Javelin is referring to those who don’t have a checking account or a primary banking relationship. They may have a prepaid card. (The unbanked have no bank relationship at all.) They tend to be young — 36% are 18 to 24 years old.

[From� Who Are the Underbanked? – American Banker Article]

The underbanked that Javelin surveyed (they are around 15% of the adult population of the US) had mobile phones and an average income of more than $50,000 per annum. This is a sizeable target market for “near bank” services that I’ve written about before, but I imagine that there are at least another 15% (and probably more) of the adult population who are overbanked. These are the great many people who have bank accounts but don’t really need them. This group are either paying for banking services that they don’t need or are losing banks’ money on “free” services. Therefore, I feel that the “near bank” market could account for around a third of the population. If we take the unbanked, underbanked and overbanked together, then, I would strongly argue that bank accounts are the problem, not the solution.

Such customers with balances under $100,000 are, in the words of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, “no longer profitable,” in most cases.

[From 3 Ways Dodd-Frank Made Banking Worse For Consumers – Business Insider]

You can’t really blame the banks for this. They exist inside a regulatory framework, with legacy infrastructure and cost structures that mean they simply cannot provide free or really low-cost services and furthermore can no longer cross-subsidise. Therefore it makes no sense for governments to enforce a ridiculous “lose-lose” settlement on the market, whereby banks are forced to provide an unprofitable “basic bank account” product of some kind to people who don’t want or need them. That is unsustainable.

The five biggest banks – Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and US Bank – have raised fees on their checking accounts so that customers who do not hold a combined minimum balance with the banks (sometimes as high as $1,500 a month) or have direct deposit are paying anywhere from $84 to $144 a year for basic services.

[From Big Banks Should Offer Low-Cost Bank Accounts – Bank Think Article – American Banker]

If bank accounts aren’t the solution, then what is? In recent times, the prepaid card has become the main alternative to a bank account and, indeed, for the majority of unbanked and overbanked people, prepaid card products are a decent alternative.

Budget-minded people fare slightly better with checking accounts; the average monthly service fees come to $3.99 for a checking account, versus $4.50 for a prepaid card. For everybody else, though, even people who handle their money responsibly most of the time, prepaid debit is cheaper.

[From� Checking Accounts More Costly Than Prepaid Debit Cards | Moneyland | TIME.com]

This has been a recurrent theme on this blog too. Often, when I speak to an audience of “banked” people, they don’t understand why anyone would want to use a prepaid card product instead of just going and getting a basic bank account (which in the UK is still free). But there are lots of reasons why prepaid cards are useful, even to the banked, when conventional bank accounts are not, especially when they are energised by the connection with mobile. Just being able to see the card balance on your mobile is sufficient to transform the usability.

a psychological and experiential disconnect between those who have traditional, full-service bank accounts and those who don’t. Hard-core bank customers may never understand how, to the unbanked and the underbanked, prepaid cards can look great-even honest.

[From Trying to Understand the Unbanked s Acceptance of Prepaid Cards – American Banker Magazine Article]

This is a great point and the article makes it well, but it does miss one aspect of this market. I have a full-service bank account, yet I also have an number of prepaid cards. I have my prepaid US dollar and prepaid Euro cards that I use when travelling, I have a prepaid Visa card (from O2 Money) that is the “house” card that the kids use when they go to the store to get groceries or school supplies or go on a trip and I have a prepaid Mastercard in my Google Wallet, although that’s getting switched off shortly.

So. prepaid looks like it might be a better solution than a basic bank account. Prepaid cards as they stand now, though, don’t fulfil all of the requirements for a near-bank account. Where are the standing orders and direct debits, for example? In the UK, this isn’t an idle speculation but one of great interest to many of our clients who have been looking at this for some time because there’s about to be a big change in the UK and it will stimulate demand for near-bank services. The welfare system in the UK is switching to a new “universal credit” system where all benefits will be unified and paid monthly in arrears.

claimants will receive just one monthly payment, paid into a bank account in the same way as a monthly salary

[From Universal Credit – DWP]

If you’re wondering why our clients care about this, it’s because it represents a money flow of around £2 billion per month that is up for grabs. The government has been sort of hoping that basic bank accounts will be the destination for this money, but for the reasons noted above, this is in question. In my opinion, what is needed is neither a bank account nor a pre-paid card but a payment account: a prepaid transactional account with an associated card, more like my O2 Money account than my Barclays Bank account but with additional functionality to emulate, in essence, instruments such as standing orders and direct debits.  A software wrap around a Payment Institution (PI) with an electronic money licence (ELMI) and a set of rich standard interfaces should do the trick. We can achieve financial inclusion if we employ some clear thinking around this sort of account and stop focusing on bank accounts. I thought Deutsche Bank’s response to the European Commission consultation on bank accounts in May illustrated this point well. They said

We believe that making payment accounts available to every citizen in the EU benefits all market participants. However, reasons for financial exclusion differ in the Member States and therefore might require different measures in order to achieve better financial inclusion. The percentage of people not having a bank account is an indication but not a proof that those people are actually financially excluded.5 Real financial exclusion is often associated with an inability to provide a proof of identity or domicile (e.g. immigrants, homeless people), unemployment or financial distress in general and low educational attainment.

In this one paragraph, they make very sensible points about financial inclusion but they switch between talking about “payment accounts” and “bank accounts” with no differentiation. But there clearly is a difference: a “payment account” to my mind is the type of prepaid account noted above, offered by either a bank or a Payment Institution. There are plenty of viable candidates who could offer such an account and make money from it. Retailers, to my mind, are in pole position but another obvious category is telcos. I know from one of the projects that we are working on in the UK that even among the long-term unemployed smartphone usage is very high indeed, so the mobile operators could be in a good position to offer payment accounts. It is worth highlighting that both Visa (with Vodafone) and MasterCard (with DT) have already begun forming the kind of partnerships that could deliver some new approaches.

MasterCard and Deutsche Telekom have announced that they will work together to roll out services across DT’s footprint in Europe, starting with an NFC wallet solution in Poland in Q3 and Germany following soon after. For now, the U.S. is not being factored in as part of the deal. In all, Deutsche Telekom has 93 million mobile subscribers in Europe, and 129 million world-wide… This service will also be SIM-based, the two companies say. Under the terms of the deal, MasterCard will be working with DT’s payment subsidiary ClickandBuy, which has the e-money license that is necessary to operate mobile payment services.

[From MasterCard Ties Up With T-Mobile For NFC Mobile Payments In Europe | TechCrunch]

I think, given the current state of development, companion open-loop cards make sense and offer an interchange income stream to cross-subsidise other functions. I notice that SFR, for example, announced just a card last week, much like the O2 Money card and similar offerings elsewhere. The transition to Universal Credit in the UK means, oddly, that the public sector may well stimulate creative and inventive players to enter the already crowded wallet marketplace because the carrot of the initial volume of government benefits is so great and if it does, I’m sure the combination of mobile wallets and chip-and-PIN cards will be the combination of choice. I’ve been invited by the Government Banking Service to give a talk about this at a forthcoming event so I will let you know how it all went later in the year.

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 very much appreciated being invited along to speak at the� Cyber Security Forum 2011 in London. I’m sorry that I couldn’t get along to the first sessions (the demands of clients trumped the future security of our great nation) but I sat through most of it. When I wandered in and sat down, avoiding the temptation to go to “Iceland – New Opportunities” instead, and I loved that within the first ten minutes I had heard about Machiavelli, the scientific illiteracy of the British civil service and how to get stuff done in ancient Greece.

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.