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[Dave Birch]  A recent global survey by Unisys found that 69% of Europeans supported the use of biometrics for identification purposes.  This wasn’t out of deep-seated concerns about security and a balanced, but informed, perspective on biometric technology: it was, frankly, because of laziness: 83% of those supporting biometrics cited convenience, not security, as their main reason for wanting the technology.  The survey also found that rather than use PIN, ID cards or biometrics, one in 10 Asia-Pacific consumers would prefer to have a chip implanted in their body!

Technorati Tags: biometrics, contactless

Continue reading “Chip ’em all”

[Jane Adams] I’ve been doing a bit of surfing around the topic of user centric identity and frankly I’m confused. I think I understand the benefits of the concept but ultimately it seems rather meaningless to me.

Continue reading “Puzzled”

[Dave Birch] The BBC’s Money Box programme had a report about the RBS/MasterCard pilot of PayPass contactless debit cards in Edinburgh. I heard it on the radio on Sunday evening. The report was, I have to say, very positive. It definitely reinforced my feeling that something different is happening in retail electronic payments.

The one concern that was expressed by an interviewee was security, but the use of the extended EMV risk management parameters (eg, the offline “noCVM” counter) appeared sufficient to overcome the fears. Yes, I know the general public aren’t especially familiar with EMV risk management parameters, but they were interviewing bank staff who had been using the contactless debit cards.

Technorati Tags: cash, contactless, debit cards, security

Continue reading “Cashless moneybox”

[Jane Adams] As a journalist, I’m all too familiar with the nasty feeling that you don’t quite understand what you are writing about. Most of the time it works out OK. Not so, sadly, for the retail correspondent of the Observer last weekend in his article on Visa contactless payments.

Continue reading “Bless”

[Dave Birch] It is the 40th anniversary (is that Ruby?) of the launch of the credit card in the UK. On 29th June 1966, the first one million Barclaycards were issued by Barclays Bank to selected customers. Barclaycard had the market to themselves for six years, as it wasn’t until 1972 that Access (remember “your flexible friend“) was launched by Lloyds, NatWest and Midland. Oddly, I still have my diary for 1972 and it makes no mention of the fact (although it does mention just how many times I played “All the Young Dudes” by “Mott the Hoople” on my cassette player (which I do remember extremely well: I loved it, but it ate batteries).

It was far from obvious, in those days, that credit cards were going to be so successful (there is £56 billion outstanding on consumer credit cards in the UK today). As late as 1970, the Nilson Report said in its third issue “The heyday of bank card profits may be over as officials begin to wonder if there will ever be such a thing as profits”. By coincidence, I was reading Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets” over the weekend and this reminded of Yogi Berra‘s famous paraphrase of the wisdom of Solon (a Greek visitor to the court of the fabulously wealthy Croesus, King of Lydia and one of the fathers of money — he was responsible for the minting of the first pure metal coins): it ain’t over till it’s over.

Technorati Tags: ATM, credit cards

Continue reading “Ruby Thursday”

[Dave Birch] A big thank you to Brian Derman from our friends at Glenbrook for posting his interesting reflections from the UBS Payments Conference in New York earlier this month. One section I thought particularly interesting, and have been thinking about, was the “fireside chat” with Elizabeth Buse, EVP of Product Management at Visa USA. Brian comments: “Within the constraints imposed by her attorneys, I felt Ms. Buse made a solid case for the continued success of Visa in the US”.

Brian noted one of her comments that “the biggest worry for the growth of Visa is not MasterCard, American Express, the ACH, or any other payment system; it is the continued confidence of consumers and merchants in the security of the system, which has obviously been shaken by recent breaches.”

Continue reading “What keeps Visa awake at night?”

[Dave Birch]  It’s not particularly surprising that you can get into the Department of Homeland Security with a fake Mexican ID (address "123 Fraud Blvd").  No-one ever looks at IDs properly, so it doesn’t matter what you put on them.  In any case, how would someone know whether a Mexican ID card is valid or not?  You need tamper-resistant chips and digital signatures to do this properly, not pictures and receptionists.

Technorati Tags: biometrics, ID cards

Continue reading “Facing up to reality”

Here’s some face recognition fun.  There’s a site called riya.com that I’ve been playing with.  Basically, you upload photos to the site a bit like Flickr except the site runs face recognition software: it picks faces out of the photos: you label them (eg, Dad).  Then you can upload more photos and search for "Dad": the software performs face recognition on the photos you’ve uploaded.  It didn’t work perfectly, but I thought the fact that it worked at all was quite interesting.

Technorati Tags: biometrics, internet

Continue reading “Home biometric fun”

[Dave Birch] There’s a new digital money podcast up: I’m talking to Will Judge, the Director of E-Money at Transport for London.

Technorati Tags: contactless, e-purse, travel

Continue reading “Tfl E-Money”