Category: Identity

4 Essential Trends in Money for your Business

21st October 2019by Consult Hyperion1 Comment

By Sanjib Kalita, Editor-in-Chief, Money20/20

This article was originally published on Money20/20.

We are in the midst of seismic societal changes of how people interact and transact. Across societies, geographies and segments, digital is the new norm. Change has accelerated, placing greater value upon flexibility and speed. Historically, money and finance have been among the more conservative and slower changing parts of society, but this has changed dramatically over the past decade by viewing money as an instigator of change rather than a lagging indicator.

Whether you are a marketer in shining armor conquering new territory, a financial wizard casting spells upon the balance sheet, or the queen or king guiding the whole enterprise, here are 4 trends about money that you should keep in mind for your business.

Platforms are the new kingdoms

Platforms are the base upon which other structures can be built. For example, App stores from Apple and Google provide the infrastructure for consumers to complete commercial transactions and manage finances through their mobile phones. While these companies develop their own digital wallets, they also enable similar services from banks, retailers and other companies. Building and maintaining the platform enables services that they would not have created on their own, like Uber or Lyft, which in turn, have created their own platforms.

Marketers trying to address customers’ needs can plug into platforms to broaden offerings or deepen engagement with target markets. Platform-based thinking implies that product and service design is ongoing and doesn’t stop with a product launch. Jack Dorsey didn’t stop when he built the Square credit card reader. The team went into lending with Square Capital. They got into consumer P2P payments with Square Cash. Their ecosystem has grown through partnerships with other companies as well as in-house development.

Digital Identities open the gates

How do your customers interact with you? Do they need to create a username and password, or can they use a 3rd party system like Google or Facebook? Are security services like two-factor authentication or biometrics used to protect credentials? Is your company protecting customer identities adequately? The importance of all of these questions is increasing and often the difference between being forced into early retirement by a massive data breach or surviving to continue to grow your business.

While identity management and digital security might not be top of mind for most marketers, they are table stakes for even the most basic future business. History is full of tales of rulers successfully fighting off armies laying sieges on castles and fortresses, only to fail when another army gets access to a key for the back door.

Context rules the experience

Credit card transactions moved from predominantly being in-store, to e-commerce sites accessed from desktop computers, and now to mobile phones. As the point-of-purchase expanded, so did the consumer use cases and thought processes. In tandem, mobile screens presents less information than desktop computer screens, which in turn presents less information than associates in a brick-and-mortar environment. Companies best able to understand context and deliver the right user experience within these constraints will build loyal customer relationships.

Apps or services created for a different use cases on the same platform, such as Facebook and Messenger apps, can help achieve this. Banks and have different apps for managing accounts or for completing transactions or payments. On a desktop, you can access these services through a single interface but on the mobile, forcing users to select their use case helps present a streamlined experience on the smaller, more time-constrained mobile screen. The use of additional data such as location, device, etc. can further streamline the experience. Marketers that don’t think about the context will lose the battle before it even begins.

Data is gold

While a marketer’s goal is to generate sales, data has become a value driver. In the financial world, data about payments, assets and liabilities has become critical in how products and services are delivered. PayPal, a fintech that began even before the word ‘fintech’, has recently been using payments data from their platform to help build a lending business for their customers. Similarly, an SME lender named Kabbage has grown to unicorn status by using data from other sources to make smarter lending and pricing decisions. In the payments industry, Stripe distilled a previously complex technology integration into a minimal data set, accessed via API, to easily build payments into new digital products and services.

Those that are able to harness the power of data will be able to predict what customers want and more effectively address their needs. In some cases, it might be using data from within your enterprise or from other platforms for targeting, pricing or servicing decisions. In other cases, it might be using data to reimagine what your product or service is.

Looking for more insights on key trends in money? Hear from 400+ industry leaders at Money20/20 USA. Money20/20 USA will be held on October 27-30, 2019 at The Venetian Las Vegas. To learn more and attend visit us.money2020.com.

This article was originally published on www.money2020.com.

IdentityNORTH 2019

3rd July 201916th September 2020by Justin GageLeave a comment

We recently attended IdentityNORTH in Toronto and as usual it was a great event to connect with colleagues and hear about what’s going in with digital identity initiatives in Canada. Aran, Krista and the entire IdentityNORTH team always put on an organized, well-run event with lots of great speakers and interesting sessions.

Continue reading “IdentityNORTH 2019”

SCA: the end of merchant liability, and other authentication factors

2nd July 201918th December 2020by Tim Richards2 Comments

The EBA’s recent Opinion on the elements of strong customer authentication under PSD2 was, apart from moving the goalposts on when SCA will be enforced, full of interesting information about what constitutes a valid SCA element. It closes some doors, opens others and ends any notion that merchants can take liability and not do SCA themselves.

Taking the final point first, there’s been a view that Article 74(2) of PSD2 permits merchants to carry on without implementing SCA as long as they take liability. We at Consult Hyperion have long argued that that is an optimistic and overly legalistic reading of the regulations and this has now been confirmed. The EBA states:

In addition, even if there were a liability shift to the payee or the payee’s PSP for failing to accept SCA, as articulated in Article74(2) of PSD2, this could not be considered an alleviation of PSPs’ obligation to apply SCA in accordance with and as specified in Article 97 of PSD2.

Basically, Article 97 takes precedence – PSPs (aka Issuers) must apply SCA so if the merchant chooses not to then rather than end up with a payment for which they’re liable they’ll end up with no payment at all. Which, you’d imagine, would rather miss the point of being a merchant.

Beyond this point the Opinion has lots of interest to say about inherence, possession and knowledge elements.

On inherence two points stand out. Firstly the Opinion unambiguously states that behavioural biometrics can be a valid factor: this opens up a world of possible low friction SCA, and we expect to see lots of innovation in this area. Secondly it states that 3DS-2 does not support inherence as none of the data points being gathered relate to biological or behavioural biometrics but – and we view this as important – 3DS-2 is a valid means of supporting SCA.

This is critical because the dynamic linking process behind 3DS-2 is not straightforward and there have been differences of opinion over whether this is compliant. Given that 3DS-2 appears to be the only game in town for CNP transactions having a statement that it’s OK is mighty important.

On possession, the EBA clarifies that OTP SMS is valid and also that mobile app based approaches can be – but only if the app is linked to the device. We’ve been arguing that this is obviously the case for a while, so it’s good to see this confirmed: although there are going to be a few app developers out there that need to revise their approaches pdq (we can help, of course!).

Also on possession the EBA has stated something that really should have been obvious to anyone taking more than a moderate interest in the topic – printed card details such as PAN and CVV or user ids and email addresses are not valid possession or knowledge elements. As a number of prominent industry players have been taking the opposite approach this could lead to some interesting developments in the coming weeks, particularly as the Opinion states that if the CVV is not printed on the card and is instead sent on a separate channel, then it is a valid knowledge element.

Overall, the analysis and discussion in the Opinion on valid SCA elements is welcome, if a trifle tardy. To be fair to the EBA, we don’t see anything in their analysis that a proper reading of the RTS wouldn’t have produced. However, it’s been clear for some time that many industry players have been making a highly liberal interpretation of the requirements usually based on a legal opinion. But PSD2 and the RTS are about principles, not rules: if you need advice on this you need to talk to the people who understand this stuff. Which, by the way, is us, not law firms.

The EBA blinks first …

28th June 2019by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

EDIT: since posting this blog the UK’s FCA has confirmed our expectation that it won’t be enforcing SCA on the 14^th September as long as the participants are aiming to comply with a soon to be announced migration plan. In the meantime it’s “working with the industry to develop a plan to migrate the industry to implement SCA for card payments in e-commerce as soon as possible”. See: https://www.fca.org.uk/news/statements/fca-response-european-banking-authority%E2%80%99s-opinion-strong-customer-authentication

The doom-laden headlines appearing in the press have, it seems, worked and the EBA has decided to replace the 14^th September deadline for the introduction of SCA with … another deadline. Only they won’t tell us what it is, presumably we have to figure it out for ourselves.

So, let’s see what the EBA has done now …

Firstly, they haven’t actually changed the date as they can’t, it’s written into EU law. But given dire warnings of a collapse in online payments they’ve come up with a fudge:

The EBA therefore accepts that, on an exceptional basis and in order to avoid unintended negative consequences for some payment service users after 14 September 2019, CAs may decide to work with PSPs and relevant stakeholders, including consumers and merchants, to provide limited additional time to allow issuers to migrate to authentication approaches that are compliant with SCA, such as those described in this Opinion, and acquirers to migrate their merchants to solutions that support SCA.

https://eba.europa.eu/documents/

Let’s summarise that. National regulators – competent authorities (CAs) – may work with PSPs (Issuing and Acquiring banks) and unregulated actors (merchants, consumers) to agree to delay the introduction of SCA. Which presumably means unprepared merchants and confused consumers are breathing a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, as this is now in the hands of local regulators there’s no guarantee at all that this will be applied evenly, opening up the possibility that some countries will enforce and others (notably the UK and France) will not.

On top of that, there’s no guarantee that Issuers won’t apply SCA anyway, even if their local regulator permits them to not do so. So merchants who are unprepared may still find themselves suffering random declines. And, furthermore, if Acquirers haven’t implemented the necessary changes then even if the merchants are compliant they may still have transactions irrevocably declined.

Note also the “limited additional time” clause. Frankly, introducing SCA prior to the critical holiday shopping period was foolish anyway (but was an unintended consequence of the 18 month implementation period following the adoption of the RTS), so we can assume that the date will be pushed out at least into early or mid 2020. The EBA adds (but not in the actual Opinion):

In order to fulfil the objectives of PSD2 and the EBA of achieving consistency across the EU, the EBA will later this year communicate deadlines by which the aforementioned actors will have to have completed their migration plans.

And that’s the catch:

This supervisory flexibility is available under the condition that PSPs have set up a migration plan, have agreed the plan with their CA, and execute the plan in an expedited manner. CAs should monitor the execution of these plans to ensure swift compliance with the PSD2 and the EBA’s technical standards and to achieve consistency of authentication approaches across the EU.

Basically, Issuers and Acquirers need to publish what they’re going to do including how they’re going to communicate the requirements to consumers and merchants respectively. Quite how this is all going to be co-ordinated is unclear – no sensible merchant is going to disadvantage themselves by unilaterally turning on SCA when its competitors aren’t. Issuers may take the same approach, as they probably don’t want their cardholders switching to other banks: but there’s no requirement on them to do so.

The rest of the opinion focuses on the validity of various authentication factors. That’s interesting too, but we’ll look at the implications of it another day.

The one thing this does allow is for 3DS-2.2 to be made ready. That’s an advantage to smart merchants who can at least develop a proper, low friction SCA strategy. In the meantime, we’re looking forward to getting involved in lots of migration planning.

Digital Identity Alphabet Soup

27th June 201930th October 2020by Justin GageLeave a comment

We’ve been attending various identity conferences over the last few months, including KNOW 2019, the Internet Identity Workshop, and IdentityNORTH in North America, and EIC and Identity Week in Europe. One of the major themes that continues to stand out in all these events is the number of simultaneous initiatives going on around the world to create standards addressing various aspects of digital identity. It’s one of the reasons we created our 3-Domain Identity Model (see here for a refresher on 3DID), to help our clients navigate their way through all of this and to think about where they may play a role.

Continue reading “Digital Identity Alphabet Soup”

Identity Week

18th June 2019by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

The opening keynote at identity week in London was given by Oliver Dowden, the Minister for implementation at the Cabinet office and therefore the person in charge of the digital transformation of government. At Consult Hyperion we think digital identity is central to digital transformation of government (and the digital transformation of everything else, for that matter) so I was looking forward to hearing the UK government’s vision for digital identity. I accompanied the Minister on his visit to the IDEMIA stand where he was shown a range of attractive burgundy passports.

In his keynote, the Minister said that the UK is seen as being at the cutting edge of digital identity and that GOV.UK Verify is at the heart of that success.

(For foreign visitors, perhaps unfamiliar with this cutting edge position, a spirit of transparency requires me to note that back on 9th October 2016, Mr. Dowden gave written statement HCWS978 to Parliament, announcing that the government was going to stop funding Verify after 18 months with the private sector responsible for funding after that.)

Given that the government spends around £1.5 billion per annum on “identity, fraud, error, debt, how much identity costs to validate, and how much proprietary hardware and software bought”, it’s obviously important for them to set an effective strategy. Now, members of the public, who don’t really know or care about digital ID might be saying to themselves, “why can’t we just use ‘sign in with Apple’ to do our taxes?”, and this is a good point. Even if they are not saying it right now, they’ll be saying it soon as they get used to Apple’s mandate that all apps that allow third-party sign-in must support it.

Right now you can’t use a GOV.UK Verify Identity Provider to log into your bank or any other private sector service provider. But in his speech the Minister said that he looks forward to a time when people can use a single login to “access their state pension and the savings account” and I have to say I agree with him. Obviously you’d want a different single login for gambling and pornography, but that’s already taken care of as, according to Sky News, “thanks to its ill-conceived porn block, the government has quietly blundered into the creation of a digital passport – then outsourced its development to private firms, without setting clear limits on how it is to be used”. One of these firms runs the world’s largest pornography site, Pornhub, so I imagine they know a thing or two about population-scale identity management.

Back to the Minister’s point though. Yes, it would be nice to have some sort of ID app on my phone and it would be great if my bank and the HMRC and Woking Council and LinkedIn would all let me log in with this ID. The interesting question is how you get to this login. Put a PIN in that and we’ll come back to it later.

The Minister made three substantive points in the speech. He talked about:

The creation of a new Digital Identity Unit, which is a collaboration between DCMS and Cabinet Office. The Unit will help foster co-operation between the public and private sector, ensure the adoption of interoperable standards, specification and schemes, and deliver on the outcome of the consultation.
A consultation to be issued in the coming weeks on how to deliver the effective organisation of the digital identity market. Through this consultation the government will work with industry, particularly with sectors who have frequent user identity interactions, to ensure interoperable ‘rules of the road’ for identity.
The start of engagement on the commercial framework for consuming digital identities from the private sector for the period from April 2020 to ensure the continued delivery of public services. The Government Digital Service will continue to ensure alignment of commercial models that are adopted by the developing identity market to build a flourishing ecosystem that delivers value for everyone.

The Minister was taken away on urgent business and therefore unable to stay for my speech, in which I suggested that the idea of a general-purpose digital identity might be quite a big bite to take at the problem. So it would make sense to look at who else might provide the “digital identities from the private sector” used for the delivery of public services. Assuming the current GOV.UK Verify identities fail to gain traction in the private sector, then I think there are two obvious private sector coalitions that might step in to do this for the government: the big banks and the big techs.

For a variety of reasons, I hope that the big banks are able to come together to respond to the comments of Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, on the necessity for a digital identity in the finance sector to work with the banks to develop some sort of financial services passport. I made some practical suggestions about this earlier in the year and have continued to discuss the concept with potential stakeholders. I think it stacks up, but we’ll have to see how things develop.

On the other hand, if the banks can’t get it together and the big techs come knocking, they are already showing off their solutions. I’ll readily admit that when the Minister first said “private sector identities”, the first thought to flash across my brain was “Apple”. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to go over to the HMRC web site fairly soon to find a “log in with Amazon” and “log in with Apple” next a button with some incomprehensible waffle about eIDAS that I, and most other normal consumers I’m sure, will simply ignore.

How do you use Apple ID to log into the Inland Revenue? Easy: you log in as you do now after sending off for the password and waiting for it to come in the post and that sort of thing and then once you are connected tell them the Apple ID that you want to use in the future. If you want to be “jackdaniels@me.com” or whatever, it doesn’t matter. It’s just an identifier for the Revenue to recognise you in the future. Then next time you go to the Inland Revenue, you log in as jackdaniels@me.com, something pops up on your iPhone and you put your thumb on it or look at it, and bingo you logged in to fill out your PAYE.

Yet another GDPR article – the story so far

11th June 2019by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

How time flies, GDPR has just had its first birthday!

This past year you will have been inundated with articles and blogs about GDPR and the impact on consumers and businesses alike. According to the UK’s Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, GDPR and its UK implementation, the Data Protection Act (DPA) 2018, has marked a “seismic shift in privacy and information rights”. Individuals are now more aware of their information rights and haven’t been shy about demanding it. In the UK, the ICO received around 14,000 personal data breach reports and over 41,000 data protection concerns from the public from 25 May 2018 to 1 May 2019, compared to around 3,300 PDB reports and 21,000 data protection concerns in the preceding year. Beyond Europe, the regulation has had a remarkable influence in other jurisdictions, where they have either enacted or are in the process of enacting a ‘GDPR equivalent’ law – something similar is underway in Brazil, Australia, California, Japan and South Korea.

With all the good intentions of GDPR some of its provisions contradict, other, equally well-intentioned EU laws. Bank Secrecy Laws on one hand, require that customers’ personal data should be protected and used for the intended purpose(s), except where otherwise consented to by the customer. AMLD4/5 on the other hand, requires that identifying personal data in ‘suspicious transactions’ should be passed on to appropriate national authorities (of course without the customer’s consent/ knowledge). Then PSD2 requires banks to open up customers’ data to authorised Third Party Providers (TPPs), subject to obtaining the customer’s consent. One issue that arises out of this is the seeming incongruity between Article 94 PSD2’s explicit consent, and GDPR’s (explicit) consent.

Under GDPR, consent is one of the lawful bases for processing personal data, subject to the strict requirements for obtaining, recording, and managing it, otherwise it’s deemed invalid. In some cases, a lack of good understanding of these rules has resulted in poor practices around consent processing. That is why organisations like the Kantara Initiative are leading the effort in developing specifications for ‘User Managed Access’ and ‘Consent Receipt’.

In addition, EU regulators have been weighing in to clarify some of the conundrums. For example, the Dutch DPA issued a guidance on the interplay of PSD2/GDPR, which shows that there’s no straightforward answer to what seems like a relatively simple question, as one might think. The EDPB has also published an opinion on the interplay between GDPR, and the slowly but surely evolving ePrivacy regulation. Suffice to say, correctly navigating the compliance requirements of all these laws are indeed challenging, but possible.

What will the second year of GDPR bring?

While regulators are keen to enforce the law, their priority is transparent co-operation, not penalties. The ICO has provided support tools, and guidance, including a dedicated help line and chat services to support SMEs. They are also in the process of “establishing a one-stop shop for SMEs, drawing together the expertise from across our regulatory teams to help us better support those organisations without the capacity or obligation to maintain dedicated in-house compliance resources.” However, for those who still choose to ‘wilfully or negligently break the law’, GDPR’s recommended administrative fines may help to focus the mind on what is at stake, in addition to the ‘cleaning up’ costs afterward. Supervisory Authorities require time and resources to investigate and clear the backlog as a result of the EU wide increase in information rights queries and complaints of the past one year. The UK’s ICO, and its Netherlands and Norwegian counterparts are collaborating to harmonise their approaches and establish a “matrix” for calculating fines. France’s CNIL has led the way with the $57 million Google fine earlier in the year, however, the ICO has confirmed that there will soon be fines for “a couple of very large cases that are in the pipeline, so also,the Irish DPC expects to levy “substantial” fines this summer.

A new but important principle in GDPR is the ‘accountability principle’ – which states that the data controller is responsible for complying with the regulation and must be able to demonstrate compliance. So, it is not enough to say, ‘we have it,’ you must be able to produce ‘appropriate evidence’ on demand to back it up. The ICO states in its ‘GDPR – one year on’ blog that “the focus for the second year of the GDPR must be beyond baseline compliance – organisations need to shift their focus to accountability with a real evidenced understanding of the risks to individuals in the way they process data and how those risks should be mitigated.” By now one would expect that most organisations would have put in the effort required beyond tick boxes to achieve an appropriate level of compliance with the regulation so they can reap the reward of continued business growth borne out of trust/loyalty from their customers.

One of the methods of demonstrating GDPR accountability is through a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) – a process by which organisations can systematically analyse, identify, and minimise the data protection risks of their project or plan ‘before going live.’ GDPR does not mandate a specific DPIA process, but expects whichever methodology chosen by the data controller to meet the requirements specified in its Article 35(7).

At Consult Hyperion, we have a long track record of thinking about the risks associated with transactional data, so much so that we published and continue to use our own Structured Risk Analysis (SRA) methodology. Our approach, in response to the needs of our customers, has always been to describe the technological risks in a language that allow the business owner, who ultimately owns the risk, to make a judgement. Building on this we have developed a business focused approach to GDPR compliant DPIA to help our customers, for the products we design, review, or develop for them.

If you’re interested in finding out more, please contact: sales@chyp.com

Know 2019 Vegas

5th April 2019by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

Well, Know 2019 in Las Vegas was great. Having attended the One World Identity (OWI) “KnowID” Washington events, it was exciting to see them grow and relocate to Las Vegas!

The event began with an “Education Day” on the Sunday preceding the main event. Consult Hyperion ran a couple of the sessions and we were taken aback at the turnout – standing room only in the session discussing the digital identity of people, companies and things that we presented with Mastercard and PaymentWorks (the hotel staff had to bring in three stacks of chairs during the talk!) and while we’d like to think that this is solely a reflection of Consult Hyperion’s leading position in the industry, we took it as a reflection of the increasing importance of digital identity across corporate strategies in a range of sectors.

As most of our clients are in the financial services sector, we naturally paid most attention to the presentations and discussions around digital identity in banking and finance. Mastercard chose the event to drive a stake into the ground around digital identity, with the launch of their paper on the topic, “Restoring Trust in a Digital World”. This presented a framework of how digital identity will work, putting the individual at the heart of every digital interaction. Mastercard’s commitment to the sector reinforced many peoples’ view that digital identity has gone up the priority list to become a matter of immediate concern for financial institutions, regulators and customers. The scale of identity theft and fraud on the one hand and the costs of patchwork digitised identity solutions on the other hand may not the pressure for real change is growing.

Outside the financial sector, I particularly enjoyed the keynote on the third day from Colleen Manaher from the US Customs and Border Control. She was talking about the use of biometrics and spent some of the time talking about the specific use of biometrics in airports as an interesting example of how to use biometric technologies for security but at the same time deliver convenience into the mass market.

The point of her talk, was partnerships around identity. In this case, she was talking about quite complex public-private partnerships in travel. The investments made in biometrics to allow paperless travel have obvious benefits in terms of security but, as we have found in our other work about the cross-sector exploitation of digital identity, intelligent use of these new capabilities can also transform the customer experience. The same biometric system that scans your passport picture on entry to the airport and then checks you in for your flight can also be used to direct you through the airport and implement smart departure boards that as you approach them switch from displaying a list of all flights to displaying your flight only.

The use of digital identity, as a means to provide what looks like convenience to the man in the street but under the hood provides much higher levels of security than are currently obtained through the use of physical documents and manual checking opens up new possibilities and set me thinking about how to replicate this dynamic, in other sectors. An obvious example of this back in financial services is for the kind of digital ID called for by Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, which would result in significant cost savings around the K YC and AML for the banks but should at the same time mean that customers can connect securely and quickly to their financial services providers.

We were sad to leave Las Vegas after such a great event but I can assure you that we’ll be back there again next year for Know2020.

MWC 2019

4th March 2019by Consult Hyperion1 Comment

Well, #teamCHYP were out in force in Barcelona. Not for the Formula One testing but for the annual mobile industry shindig, the GSMA’s Mobile World Congress. As usual, we had full days of meetings interspersed with traversing the halls in search of anything that might be of interest to clients. I don’t want to talk about the innovations in mobile (like cool bendy screens and the Samsung S10 under glass fingerprint sensor) here, but I do want to make a point about the renewed focus on digital identity.

We made digital identity one of our “live five” areas for clients to focus on this year, so I was very happy indeed to to be asked to take part in a fireside chat on the subject of trust and identity with Ajay Bhalla, President, Cyber and Intelligence Solutions at Mastercard. He’s a smart guy, and well-positioned to survey the landscape to help us to pick out some routes between the hackers and fraudsters and hucksters and scaremongers.

We didn’t rehearse any questions, we just went on stage to have an intelligent conversation about what can be done to gain, and maintain, the trust of the public. If we cannot do this, then online commerce, online government and online interaction of all kinds will be subverted and the friction associated with online transactions will become so great that the economy will suffer. Ajay was optimistic about the new technologies in this space (as are the team at Consult Hyperion) and explained how biometrics and big data will work together to identify customers and minimise disruption to customer journeys.

(I think Mastercard and the other schemes will want to set the bar quite high here. When PSD2 comes in to effect in September, poor implementations of Secure Customer Authentication, or SCA, will have significant financial impacts on online businesses)

“As David put it during our discussion: Mastercard is moving from payment player to identity leader.“

It was certainly educational to discuss these issues with Ajay. The fact is that Mastercard is making significant investments in the digital identity space means that their opinions, and their strategy, are of great interest. As it happened, Mastercard’s executive Vice Chair Ann Cairns was also emphasising their focus on digital identity at the event.

You can see why digital ID is so crucial. Identity theft and fraud have become significant friction in the online world and so tackling them is a priority. But there’s also the strategic role of identity in the always-on, connected world. I can well imagine an ecosystem in which Mastercard switch vastly more identity transactions – everything from letting my garage door identity my car on the way to logging me to the Daily Telegraph – than payment transactions.

“Why digital identities will be so important in the next few years, according to Mastercard’s vice chairman.”

Europe’s approach to data protection will be adopted worldwide, Mastercard’s Cairns says from CNBC.

It wasn’t all thought leadership, customer meetings and heated debate about bendy screens though. We had some fun at #MWC19 too. Caption competition in 3… 2… 1…

See you all at MWC2020

Loosely-coupled MaaS payments

27th February 20197th August 2020by John Elliott2 Comments

I was a panellist discussing the barriers to mobility as a service (MaaS) at the Transport Ticketing Global (TTG19) conference in London in January. In fact, many of the presentations over the two-day conference were about MaaS and reasons why it is proving very hard to deliver. Perhaps one of the most mature MaaS offerings is the one from MaaS Global branded as ‘Whim’ which launched in the UK in the West Midlands but, by their own admission, has struggled to gain a foothold.

Until recently, MaaS providers have avoided London. We have seen some excellent journey planning apps exploiting Transport for London’s (TfL) open APIs, but nobody was going that extra mile and actually proving a complete MaaS solution in a single app that allow both planning journeys together with payment and ticketing (i.e. proving authority to travel when entering the transit network). TfL has been very clear that they will not provide any cut of the fares to MaaS providers, so they will have to find other ways to make a profit.

So, the announcement from CityMapper that they are about to launch a MaaS solution in London surely doesn’t make any sense? Given the above barriers to MaaS and the high complexity of London’s public transport network, why on earth would you start there?

The answer is payments and identity, two of our favourite topics. These are services needed in order to offer account-based ticketing (ABT) and ABT is a corner-stone of MaaS. Passengers need to identify themselves to their customer account so that their journey charges can be calculated. Payment for the journeys needs to be handled in a way that is suitable to the particular customer.

One of the barriers I suggested on the TTG19 panel is that payment and identity are too ‘closely coupled’ in modern account-based ticketing offerings. I am old enough to remember the emergence of service oriented architectures in the ‘noughties’. The idea was that by ensuring services are ‘loosely coupled’, they can freely evolve without affecting consumers or implementations. I argued that if everyone rushes to implement the open-loop payment models with the payment networks like TfL has done, then we will be left with fare collection services that are highly dependent on the payment schemes and constrained from evolution. The identifier the passenger uses at the gate is their bank card (or its emulation on mobile or wearable devices). This identifies them to their ABT travel account but it also identifies their means of payment. Some would say this is convenient, I am suggesting it is too closely coupled and will stifle innovation.

Open banking APIs are a subject close to our hearts at the moment. The APIs are very new and they seem not to be thinking about transit payments at this stage. However, one could imagine that there could be future open banking APIs that would allow passengers to consent to transit payments from their bank to their MaaS provider without the need for the payment networks in between. I expect this will be subject of future blogs or white papers from Chyp.

The reason CityMapper is launching in London is that all the public transport modes accept open-loop payments and the CityMapper solution to payments and identity is to provide their MaaS customers with a Mastercard-branded prepaid card, ‘Pass’. CityMapper will offer a subscription model at a discount on TfL prices and any travel on TfL modes outside of this will simply use the prepaid bank card like any other.

This works for all London public transport modes, but there are very few other cities that have committed so totally to the open-loop models. It will be interesting to see whether CityMapper can make a profit and if they do, whether they can replicate it outside of London. Right now, it looks like they are using investment funding and planning on taking a loss to start with since they are offering to undercut the TfL fares and as stated above TfL has said they will not offer discounts to Maas providers. Or perhaps city mapper is planning on selling advertising space or plans to sell anonymised travel data to make up the shortfall? Only time will tell.

Meanwhile, may all your transit tokens be loosely coupled and your payment instruments plentiful.