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Britcoin or Brit-PESA?
Remember last year when some Bitcoin chaps apparently used a “freedom of information” request to get hold of Citi’s response to the UK government’s consultation on digital currencies and the like....
View ArticleNo fintech disruption? It’s already started
I came across an article in Finextra about fintech and disruption. I put it to one side, meaning to respond to it, but I didn’t bother because Brett King got in before me. However having just come...
View ArticleShould customers be charged more to use chip and PIN? Yes!
Now that more than one in ten retail card transactions is in the UK is contactless, I think we’re beginning to approach a tipping point around the technology. This is important, because I think it’s a...
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Fraud, liability and (guess what) identity
E-mail fraud, or what you might better term “fraud enabled by people’s bizarre misplaced trust in e-mail” is absolutely rampant. The FBI, in a new alert, estimates that fraud losses linked to so-called...
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Doing something about US card fraud
OK, OK, so we all know that the world’s card fraud has been steadily migrating to the US because the rest of the world was busy adopting EMV (“chip and PIN”) cards while the US insisted on sticking...
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Barclaycard contactless mobile is up and running
I can’t remember if I told you about this cool project that Consult Hyperion has been helping out with over the last year or so. One of our very favourite clients, Barclaycard, decided to exploit the...
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Scientific advice about the blockchain
The British Government’s Chief scientific adviser, Sir Mark Walport, has published his Government Office for Science report on “Distributed Ledger Technology: beyond blockchain”. In his report, Sir...
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Location, location, location and financial innovation
In his super book “Money Tales”, Alessandro Giraudo looks at the emergence of paper financial instruments and tells how the great medieval trade fairs of Europe were gradually replaced by financial...
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Key trends in digital payments for 2016
The nice people at Westminster eForum invited me along to give one of the talks at their Digital Payments event at the Royal Society in London. I gave a talk about key trends in digital payments for...
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Cashless as Count Zero
Speaking at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, John Cryan (the co-CEO of Deutsche Bank AG), said that cash could become history “within a decade”, going on to note that it is terribly...
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Ledgers, banking architecture and pipes
For reasons that are genuinely too boring to recount, I was flicking through New Scientist magazine over the weekend. I read the magazine very throughly, so I’m a little behind on issues at the moment,...
View ArticleApple are right and wrong
I’m sure you’ve all seen this story by now. Thousands of iPhone 6 users claim they have been left holding almost worthless phones because Apple’s latest operating system permanently disables the...
View ArticleAre central banks a relic of the Industrial Revolution?
Are central banks artefacts of the Industrial Revolution, like canal networks or newspapers, or are they indispensable to the operation of the modern economy? To be honest, I tend to the more...
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Ten more years! Ten more years!
Saint Valentine, as I am sure you all know, is the patron saint of customer verification methods (CVMs). We celebrate St. Valentine’s Day on 14th February every year to commemorate the introduction of...
View ArticleChina, cash and cryptocurrency
The Governor of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), Zhou Xiaochuan, has given an extensive interview [transcript] in which he sets out the Bank’s current thinking about digital currency. [Zhou] said...
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How can we reshape retail without reshaping payments?
Well, the circus came to town again. Barcelona. It’s 100,000 people and non-stop meetings and basically no fun whatsoever. But it’s in Barcelona. The calendar is jammed from first thing in the morning...
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Shared ledgers, shared laughs and shared learning
Well. The lovely people from FinTechStage, principally my old friends Matteo Rizzi (who was one of the co-founders of SWIFT Innotribe) and Lazaro Campos (who used to run SWIFT), persuaded me that...
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Learning more about the replicated distributed shared ledger formerly known...
Well done to my old chum Chris Skinner for setting up the Financial Services Club debate around the blockchain this week. I had fun, I learned a lot and we got great feedback on the evening and the...
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RTGS NBG OMG SOS SLT PDQ SLAP
I gave a talk on the blockchain and such like to the Scottish Financial Services Club. It was a lot of fun, and I got a couple of really excellent questions that made me think on my feet, something I...
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EMV in the USA, Part 97: Recalcitrant retailers
American retailers have been lobbying the great and good to implement PIN for card transactions. We have chip and PIN, so we think this is nothing new. But note this is not what they are asking for....
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