Mobile payments are fun again. Now that Apple have said that they paying with your phone is OK, all the cool kids want to do it. But how exactly are mobile payments going to work in the mass market?
The narrative around Bitcoin has, if you hadn’t noticed, shifted toward the blockchain in recent times. So if that’s case, what is the technology and what are we going to do with it?
In Europe the banks are being forced to open up APIs for third-party access to bank accounts. Obviously, this will cost money and entails risks. But from the work that Consult Hyperion has already done for banks in this area, I think I can see at least one way to build a positive business model around them.
Technologically speaking, the credit card as we know it should have vanished long ago. It’s surely not got much longer .
Why are people who use debit cards, PingIt and other modern contrivances required to pay for people who want to mess around posting pieces of paper to each other? It’s time to either draw a line under cheques or shift to full cost recovery pricing on cheque books.
I gave a talk on the blockchain to the Vendorcom Cryptocurrency SIG, putting forward a couple of fairly radical ideas about Bitcoin, the blockchain and the future. Or so I thought.
The era of “faster payments” is over, even before it’s begun in the US. We’re now into the era of “instant payments” and that’s great, because we’re also in an era of “instant commerce”
If people want cash, it’s pretty reasonable to ask them what it’s for, since we all have to suffer the externalities.
Wandering around #MWC15 in Barcelona this year I got involved in a bunch of conversations about Apple Pay, Loop, NFC and so on. But I thought that focus on the physical, in-store interface, could be diverting people away from the central strategic shift to in-app payments.
I wonder if there is room for a blog that brings together payments and the paranormal? A Fintech Fortean Times, if you will? In an age where the Tory chairman of the Parliamentary Group on Integrated Healthcare is recommending that the National Health Service starts to treat patients with astrology and homeopathy, we need to be open to new thinking, don’t we?
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