Every year Consult Hyperion publishes our Live 5. We try to shine a lens on the year ahead and think about what will be impacting our clients. The themes for 2021 are:
Today I want to explore the topic of micro location from the point of view of (mostly) Apple ecosystem, and how developers can leverage application programming interfaces (APIs) to build useful apps. In order to understand that, first we should visit the topic of location in general – how do devices know where they are?
As an example of creative thinking in promoting inclusion, I would like to highlight John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute, a thoroughly modern Victorian, educated by his mother until the age of 12. He was ridiculed by society for his progressive views in paying great attention to the education of his daughters as well as his sons. Considered the richest man of his time, his hobby was building the finest fairy tale castles. He also built a magnificent building for the medical school at the University of St Andrews and endowed the Bute Chair of Medicine. When the male anatomy lecturer refused to teach women, he simply hired a woman as an additional lecturer, to teach any students who wished to learn with her. In this way, he managed to provide an environment in which women and men could train alongside one another, without coming into conflict with the existing hierarchy. Perhaps surprisingly, we still have lessons to learn from his approach.
In our Live 5 for 2021 we raised micro-location as an area of technology where we expect to start seeing significant advances being made. UWB (Ultra Wideband) is just starting to get traction in consumer electronics and we believe that this will trigger innovation in micro-location technology.
When we look forward to 2021, it is no surprise that COVID-19 is the dominant factor. So far as the merchant payments world is concerned, the shape of the post-pandemic new normal transaction environment must be the key strategic consideration for stakeholders and I am desperately keen to hear the variety of informed opinion on this topic that I have come to expect at Merchant Payments Ecosystem every year. At Consult Hyperion we like to contribute to these conversations by providing a useful framework for discussion: our annual “Live 5”, our yearly set of suggestions for strategic focus. This year, we choose to look at the key issue of pandemic transformation and its impact of on the three key domains where our clients operate: Payment, Identity and Transit, together with (as is traditional!) a suggestion as to a technology that the POS world may not be thinking about but probably should be.
At this time of year my colleague, Dave Birch looks forward, his annual “Live Five” started as a bit of fun, but over the years has become a thought provoking look at what might impact our industry in the coming year, if you haven’t read it yet, please follow this link.
As we come to the holiday season, we know that we will be bombarded with reviews of 2020 on television, in our newspapers and online. A conversation with some colleagues about how long they had worked in the payments industry, prompted my own review when I realised that on the 8th December, I clocked up 40 years in the industry, how technology has changed our lives in that time.
It’s that time of year again: where’s it’s traditional to take stock and look to the future. At Consult Hyperion, we do that through our ‘Live 5’ process; where we look at major trends in business, technology and consumer attitudes and project them onto our areas of business focus, with twists of our own. This is more than a marketing exercise. It informs our advisory services, but also sets our own strategy, for example by determining what technologies are investigated, and protypes built, by our Hyperlab unit.
For most of us 2020 isn’t going to be a year to linger fondly in the memory. It’s been a monumental slog in the face of grim news and little cheer but from a payments perspective we’ve seen an unsurprising surge in interest in all things payment related.
People have moved from cash to electronic payments – contactless transaction numbers have soared. People moved from face to face purchases to online. And, there’s been a ton of stress on payment systems as people have demanded refunds for holidays and flights they couldn’t take due to various travel restrictions. It’s been a year like never before.
We can expect this to be exacerbated over what will likely be an extended Black Friday and Christmas holiday shopping period. Online payments are expected to grow even though economies are in recession. For us in Europe it’s the last hurrah before PSD2 requirements on strong customer authentication come into force on January 1st. Merchants and payment companies will be well staffed on News Year Eve as they wait and see how the systems will hold up, and what sort of abandonment figures they’ll see as puzzled customers are presented with confusing authentication screens. We can probably expect a flood of concerned calls about phishing which are actually Strong Customer Authentication requests.
A couple of weeks ago I was delighted to host one of our weekly COVID-19 webinars. We discussed the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic on public transport and how our technologies are likely to be used to help.
We had two panellists from Consult Hyperion (Neil McEvoy, CEO, and Simon Laker, Principal Consultant from our US office) and the guest panellist was Steve Cassidy from Fuse Mobility, a Scottish start-up providing Mobility as a Service (MaaS) software solutions.
The discussion was divided into three parts as follows:
MaaS solutions – ones that integrate different existing transport providers to provide a near seamless door-to-door experience for consumers – were assumed to be the long term ‘direction of travel’ in order to address the mobility, congestion and pollution issues. Our MaaS Payments white paper in July 2019 showed that integration is key:
Many public transport operators are providing ‘enhanced Sunday services’. As most passengers stay at or work from home, we are seeing a decline in ridership of 75-95% across the globe. Changing patterns of user mobility when working from home means there are many fewer advance purchases in an uncertain future with tightly managed budgets. This is pushing us towards the future we already thought was coming where PAYG dominates and season tickets are irrelevant. Operator web sites are having to make special provision for customers claiming refunds on their season tickets which they can no longer use.
Meanwhile, we are seeing reports of levels of traffic being back at 1955 levels and the improvement of air quality leading to an estimated 1,752 avoided pollution deaths in the UK.
For me, the most interesting technical development for coming out of Lockdown is the ‘Privacy-preserving contact tracing apps’ being proposed by various government and organisations across the globe. We have seen an unprecedented co-operation between Apple and Google in agreeing to modify their mobile device operating systems to accommodate such apps. The technology proposed is Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) which uses radio waves over distances up to 10m. The technology is the same as has been tried without much success for running Be-In Be-Out (BIBO) transit payment schemes. These tend to suffer from not being able to detect accurately enough whether a potential passenger is on or off a bus, or just standing nearby. And they also suffer from being no more convenient to use than established technologies such as contactless cards and 2-D barcodes.
BLE will allow two contact tracing apps to detect each other and share anonymised information about being in contact that can be used later to alert potentially infected parties when someone declares themselves as having tested positive.
The UK government has rejected the proposals from Apple, Google and several others to instead prefer a centralised approach because they believe the alternative would lead to a delay in the reporting of symptoms, amongst other consequences. Only time will tell whether the UK population can be convinced to use the NHS app which launched a trial in the Isle of Wight on 4 May. Steve Pannifer recently blogged about this. And we discussed it on week 6 of our Webinars, the recording of which will be available on our website soon.
What will the future hold for public transport when lock down lifts? On the webinar we considered what plans China had in place at that time. The Shenzhen bus company paper about combatting COVID-19 covers the following points:
There is an opportunity for MaaS Providers post lockdown since the public are likely to be either using their private cars to avoid contact with others or else using on demand services.
The transit COVID-19 webinar recording is available to watch. Many thanks to our panellists for sharing their time and insights.
We continue to host weekly webinars every Thursday at 4pm BST. Let us know if you would like to register to attend.
So far the tech giants seem to be the coronavirus winners, with a massive surge in digital communications and online orders. The impact on lift sharing companies is less clear.
The guidance from both Uber and Lyft says that if they are notified (by a public health authority) that a driver has COVID-19 they may temporarily suspend the driver’s account. It is not exactly clear how this would work.
That got us wondering whether digital identity systems, that we spend so much time talking about, could help. It seems to me there are two potential identity questions here:
1. Is the driver who Uber or Lyft thinks it is?
2. Does the driver have coronavirus?
The first question should be important to Uber and Lyft at any time. Ok, for the moment they want to be sure that they know who is driving to give them a better chance of knowing if the driver has the disease. But there are all sorts of other reasons why they might want to be sure that the driver is who they think it is – can the person legally drive for one.
The second question is harder. Just because the driver doesn’t have the virus today, doesn’t mean he or she won’t have it tomorrow. Maybe, perhaps the ability to share an isRecovered? attribute that says “I’ve recovered from the illness” would be useful when we start to see the light at the end of this tunnel we are entering. And the ability to share that anonymously might be helpful too – providing assurance to both driver and passenger.
All this to one side, the guidance from both Uber and Lyft outlines financial measures they are putting in place to provide security to drivers that self-isolate. That is a great example of responsibility providing the incentive and support required to allow their drivers to do the right thing.
At Consult Hyperion we take a certain amount of enjoyment looking back over some of our most interesting projects around the world over the previous year or so, wrapping up thoughts on what we’re hearing in the market and spending some time thinking about the future. Each year we consolidate the themes and bring together our Live Five.
2020 is upon us and so it’s time for some more future gazing! Now, as in previous years, how can you pay any attention to our prognostications without first reviewing our previous attempts? In 2017 we highlighted regtech and PSD2, 2018 was open banking and conversational commerce, and for 2019 it was secure customer authentication and digital wallets — so we’re a pretty good weathervane for the secure transactions’ world! Now, let’s turn to what we see for this coming year.
Hello 2020
Our Live Five has once again been put together with particular regard to the views of our clients. They are telling us that over the next 12 months retailers, banks, regulators and their suppliers will focus on privacy as a proposition, customer intimacy driven by hyper-personalisation and personalized payment options, underpinned by a focus on cyber-resilience. In the background, they want to do what they can to reduce their impact on the global environment. For our transit clients, there will be a particular focus on bringing these threads together to reduce congestion through flexible fare collection.
So here we go…
1. This year will see privacy as a consumer proposition. This is an easy prediction to make, because serious players are going to push it. We already see this happening with “Sign in with Apple” and more services in this mould are sure to follow. Until quite recently privacy was a hygiene factor that belonged in the “back office”. But with increasing industry and consumer concerns about privacy, regulatory drivers such as GDPR and the potential for a backlash against services that are seen to abuse personal data, privacy will be an integral part of new services. As part of this we expect to see organisations that collect large amounts of personal data looking at ways to monetise this trend by shifting to attribute exchange and anonymised data analytics. Banks are an obvious candidate for this type of innovation, but not the only one – one of our biggest privacy projects is for a mass transit operator, concerned by the amount of additional personal information they are able to collect on travellers as they migrate towards the acceptance of contactless payment cards at the faregate.
2. Underpinning all of this is the urgent need to address cyber-resilience. Not a week goes by without news of some breach or failure by a major organisation putting consumer data and transactions at risk. With the advent of data protection regulations such as GDPR, these issues are major threats to the stability and profitability of companies in all sectors. The first step to addressing this is to identify the threats and vulnerabilities in existing systems before deciding how and where to invest in countermeasures.
Our Structured Risk Analysis (SRA) process is designed to help our customers through this process to ensure that they are prepared for the potential issues that could undermine their businesses.
3. Privacy and Open Data, if correctly implemented and trusted by the consumer, will facilitate the hyper-personalisation of services, which in turn will drive customer intimacy. Many of us are familiar with Google telling us how long it will take us to get home, or to the gym, as we leave the office. Fewer of us will have experienced the pleasure of being pushed new financing options by the first round of Open Banking Fintechs, aimed at helping entrepreneurs to better manage their start-up’s finances.
We have already demonstrated to our clients that it is possible to use new technology in interesting ways to deliver hyper-personalisation in a privacy-enhancing way. Many of these depend on the standardization of Premium Open Banking API’s, i.e. API’s that extend the data shared by banks beyond that required by the regulators, into areas that can generate additional revenue for the bank. We expect to see the emergence of new lending and insurance services, linked to your current financial circumstances, at the point of service, similar to those provided by Klarna.
4. One particular area where personalisation will have immediate impact is giving consumers personalised payment options with new technologies being deployed, such as EMV’s Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) and W3C’s payment request API. Today, most payment solutions are based around payment cards but increasingly we will see direct to account (D2A) payment options such as the PSD2 payment APIs. Cards themselves will increasingly disappear to be replaced by tokenized equivalents which can be deployed with enhanced security to a wide range of form factors – watches, smartphones, IoT devices, etc. The availability of D2A and tokenized solutions will vastly expand the range of payment options available to consumers who will be able to choose the option most suitable for them in specific circumstances. Increasingly we expect to see the awkwardness and friction of the end of purchase payment disappear, as consumers select the payment methods that offer them the maximum convenience for the maximum reward. Real-time, cross-border settlement will power the ability to make many of our commerce transactions completely transparent. Many merchants are confused by the plethora of new payment services and are uncertain about which will bring them more customers and therefore which they should support. Traditionally they have turned to the processors for such advice, but mergers in this field are not necessarily leading to clear direction.
We know how to strategise, design and implement the new payment options to deliver value to all of the stakeholders and our track record in helping global clients to deliver population-scale solutions is a testament to our expertise and experience in this field.
5. In the transit sector, we can see how all of the issues come together. New pay-as-you-go systems based upon cards continue to rollout around the world. The leading edge of Automated Fare Collection (AFC) is however advancing. How a traveller chooses to identify himself, and how he chooses to pay are, in principle, different decisions and we expect to see more flexibility. Reducing congestion and improving air quality are of concern globally; best addressed by providing door-to-door journeys without reliance on private internal combustion engines. This will only prove popular when ultra-convenient. That means that payment for a whole journey (or collection or journeys) involving, say, bike/ride share, tram and train, must be frictionless and support the young, old and in-between alike.
Moving people on to public transport by making it simple and convenient to pay is how we will help people to take practical steps towards sustainability.
So, there we go. Privacy-enhanced resilient infrastructure will deliver hyper-personalisation and give customers more safe payment choices. AFC will use this infrastructure to both deliver value and help the environment to the great benefit of all of us. It’s an exciting year ahead in our field!
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