* to people who read blogs about digital money.
Cultural learnings of Kazakhstan for make benefit glorious nation of America
Month: November 2006
Is that what you wanted?
[Dave Birch] I had a chance to read through the Diamond report on the future of the cards industry. It provides a useful overview of the challenges and opportunities for cards in the U.S. It also makes an interesting point about contactless that is well worth reviewing.
Technorati Tags: contactless, mobile
A big week for identity
[Dave Birch] It was a big week in the world of identity. It was the 7th annual Digital Identity Forum in London and in Washington the first GSA ID cards were being issued. Here’s final updated version of the agenda for the forum…
We’ll upload all of the presentations that we have to the Forum web site over the next day or two so please feel free to drop in and download. And about the GSA…
We’ll upload all of the presentations that we have to the Forum web site over the next day or two so please feel free to drop in and download. And about the GSA…
Payments, profits, competition
[Dave Birch] It’s a bit of a paradox. Lots of people want to get into payments. It seems as if a new scheme (especially around mobile) is announced every week. This is presumably because they think they will make money — as, in fact, Paypal have done with net income of $281 million last quarter — and can grow a business. Yet people who are in payments (eg, banks) don’t find it such a great business. Here are some rough figures for the spreadsheet: in Europe, payments account for a about a quarter of bank revenues and about a third of bank costs, contributing less than a tenth of bank income (in the US, payments account for a slightly bigger proportion of both revenues and costs and the contribution to income is slightly higher). The scale of the business is so huge, though, that this small net income is still in the region of 10 billion euros for EU-25 banks.
Technorati Tags: banking, cash, costs, debit cards, payments, SEPA
It’s all about density
[Dave Birch] Why is the introduction of a near-field communication (NFC) interface to a mobile phones continuing to generate so much attention, continuing to spark so many pilots and occupying so much of this blog when there are — to all intents and purposes — no NFC phones in use and none in the shops? I was thinking about this again today because of the announcement of MasterCard’s NFC pilot with NFC pilot with 7 Eleven in Dallas. It’s interesting to digital money watchers because it’s going to use over-the-air (OTA) loading and personalisation of the Paypass application into Nokia phones on 7 Eleven’s Speak Out MVNO.
Technorati Tags: contactless, mobile
Your eyeball – consider it confiscated
[Jane Adams]One of the issues we discussed during the second day of the Digital Identity Forum was revocation in biometrics. There was some confusion about whether a biometric identifier could be revoked – after all, you are hardly going to hand over a finger if a fingerprint scan is compromised. What can be revoked though is the template and a single fingerprint can generate a high number of different templates.
Direct from the Digital Identity Forum 2
[Jane Adams]The final panel session of the afternoon of day one was entitled ‘Fantasy National ID’. Panelist were invited to describe their perfect national identity system (without any negative comments about existing or proposed real life systems).
Direct from the Digital Identity Forum 1
[Jane Adams] It’s rare for a conference presentation to draw gasps of amazement from the audience, but Professor Russell Cowburn’s did. Presenting on behalf of Imperial College and Ingenia Technology, he described and demonstrated a system that used laser optics to determine a fingerprint from documents – basically the biometrics of documents.
