Contactless front line

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[Dave Birch] You may have noticed the announcement of a new contactless purse/loyalty scheme in the UK.

UK coffee chain Coffee Republic has teamed up with electronic money operator sQuidcard to launch the Coffee Republic contactless prepaid ‘Payment and Loyalty’ card.

[From The Paypers. Insights in payments.]

I asked Forum friend Adam Smith at sQuidcard for a card and he was kind enough to send me one. I logged on to their web site, registered, loaded a tenner and looked forward to my first contactless loyalty experience.

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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.

Drastic for plastic

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[Dave Birch] At the recent Digital Money Summit in London, Tomi Ahonen noted that more people on Earth send text messages that use the Internet and that there are 3.4 billion mobile phones in use worldwide (of which three billion are unique subscribers). To illustrate the critical role of mobile phones in the future of payments, he used the example of South Korea to light up the trajectory of payment cards. There, half of the population already use mobile payments of one form or another

Incidentally, he also mentioned that 43% of the population there have a Cyworld account. I’ve written about Cyworld and it’s Acorn currency before, but this reinforced the view that we should not see virtual worlds such as Cyworld as games. They are not games — from the payments perspective — they are transaction spaces. Cyworld, by the way, is now the world’s second biggest music store after iTunes.

In South Korea, gift cards for the virtual currency used in Cyworld, known as dotori (“acorns”), are sold in more than 10,000 retail outlets as well as online and via mobile phones. Players use the currency to buy avatars and media to decorate their virtual space. Since one dotori costs approximately 10 cents, this market is obviously limited. Indeed, it amounts to only about $200,000. Per day.

[From Dave Birch: | Technology | The Guardian]

Tomi’s main point, though, and a point that has stuck with me since, is that we (ie, payments people) should not be taking existing instruments such as credit cards and simulating them on mobile phones, we should be creating “something that is magic” because great mobile services — whether Shazam, one of my favourites, or the cameraphones that convert English text to Japanese — look like magic to the consumer. Yes! Another manifesto commitment for digital money!

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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.