Tag: digital money electronic money mobile payments e-payment m-payment

They’re not playing games

4th May 2011by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

It was obvious a few years ago that not only were virtual worlds going to be big business, but that they would have an impact on the payments market. I used put things like World of Warcraft into product and service roadmap discussions for our clients in the financial services space, and I’m sure that they thought I was doing it just for fun, just to get some discussion going. But having played around in the space, I could see it would lead to some new thinking. When you’re sending World of Warcraft gold pieces to a friend in Asia via an elven intermediary (quicker and cheaper than banks, by the way) you can’t help but wonder at the “real world” instruments to hand. This from three years ago…

Well it wouldn’t surprise anyone then, that most of our partners report they have a completion rate of 0.5-1% when they present a credit card payment page to their users for virtual goods…Mobile on the other hand… takes 15 seconds, and off goes the user to his virtual good or points that will enhance his game or app experience immediately without ever leaving the environment of the app.
[From Virtual Goods / Currency and Mobile Payments: the business model for Social Apps]

Note that figure: one in a hundred transactions complete. People playing at being virtual farmers want to buy some virtual cows, so they click to buy, but when they see a credit card payment screen, they can’t be bothered. So there was a demand for a new kind of payment instrument that was not being met by the banks. Look how much things have changed since then, with the incredible boom in app store and in-game payments. There’s no doubt that the retail payments roadmap is indeed being affected by the world of games.

Now I’m not implying that it’s only payments will be impacted, because in the longer run it will be many kinds of financial service, including banking.

The publisher of the online science-fiction game “Entropia Universe,” set on the planet Calypso, received a banking license from the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority last week and plans to open a real bank within a year, albeit one without physical, walk-in branches.

Players of “Entropia” already exchange real money for a virtual currency that is used for their expenses on Calypso. And virtual money they make in the game, through hunting, mining, trading or other activities, can be cashed out into real money. The virtual currency, Project Entropia Dollars, has a fixed 10-to-1 exchange rate to the U.S. dollar.

By setting up a real-world bank, Sweden-based publisher MindArk PE AB gains the protection of the Swedish government’s deposit insurance for these accounts, up to about $60,000 for each customer.
[From The Associated Press: Online game gets real-world banking license]

A healthy development! My younger son spends a lot of time online with his friends at the moment, hanging out not at the mall but at the WoW auction house (this is where he learns about economics, I’m happy to say). That’s where our clients’ next generation of customers are learning about money, payments and financial services. This from two years ago…

Today, Facebook application developers monetize their games and other applications by accepting payment directly using PayPal, Google, Amazon FPS, or SocialGold. Or developers may opt to receive direct payment via mobile phone via Zong, Boku, or another mobile payment provider… game developers in particular, often accept payment via a prepaid card sold in retail establishments, such as the Ultimate Game Card. The social and gaming web is exploding with virtual currency offerings, yet thus far no one model or payment brand dominates.
[From Purchasing Facebook Credits with Zong Mobile Payments — Payments Views from Glenbrook Partners]

Now, forward-looking organisations could see what was going on and began to target R&D appropriately.

Google is developing a micropayment platform that will be “available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year,”… The system, an extension of Google Checkout, would be a new and unexpected option for the news industry as it considers how to charge for content online.
[From Google developing a micropayment platform and pitching newspapers: “‘Open’ need not mean free” » Nieman Journalism Lab]

The idea was then that micropayments would be a payment vehicle available to both Google and non-Google properties within the year. The idea was to allow viable payments of a penny to several dollars by aggregating purchases across merchants and over time. Google planned to mitigate the risk of non-payment by assigning credit limits based on past purchasing behavior and having credit card instruments on file for those with higher credit limits and using proprietary risk engines to track abuse or fraud. Merchant integration through Checkout would be extremely simple. Google, in fact, subsequently decided to purchase an in-game payments company rather than build it themselves.

Facebook and Google are poised to challenge the banking industry in online payments.
[From Facebook and Google Encroach on Banks Turf – US Banker Article]

Is this really true? I think the answer is yes and no, in the sense that I can’t see any reason why Facebook or Google would want to be a bank, unless it’s to get some sort of government handout, but I can see why they might want to get involved in payments in order to make money (not from the payments, where margins are thin, but from new products and services that have payments integral to them). This is why the news that Facebook had also begun experimenting with a payment system was hardly unexpected, but was notable nonetheless. There was an expectation that the existence of a secure and convenient micropayment scheme for Facebook users (of which there now more than 600 million) would stimulate the development of a new marketplace within Facebook’s “barbed wire”. This seemed plausible to me — if it had been up to me, I would have added a spurious green element to the proposition somehow (getting merchants and other organisations to give out Facebook credits to reward environmentally desirable behaviour) — and I was sure it would do well. I wondered in a number of forums as to who else might enter this more competitive currency market?

In the coming months, facebook users will be able to obtain facebook Credits using MOL points purchased through MOL’s network of more than 500,000 outlets, which are mainly in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, India, Australia and New Zealand. In addition to outlets such as 7-Eleven stores and cybercafes, customers will be able to purchase Credits through MOL’s network of online banks in these countries.
[From Finextra: Facebook moves virtual currency offline]

I gave a talk last year when I mentioned that I thought that Facebook credits would become the biggest virtual currency in the world fairly quickly. Unusually for my glib and sweeping predictions from the conference platform, this one appears to have come true, and even more quickly than I had imagined.

By the end of the year, Facebook expects that Credits will be used to buy the vast majority of virtual goods sold on Facebook. The fast-growing market is expected to reach $835 million on Facebook this year, according to the Inside Network… Through Credits, Facebook will take a 30 percent cut… To bolster that market, Facebook began selling Credits gift cards at Target stores across the country this month.
[From Facebook Promotes Its Credits as Path to Dollars – NYTimes.com]

Now this will one day become a standard business school case study. Talking of which, a few years ago, as part of a course I was teaching at Visa’s Bank Card Business School, a colleague and I mocked up a future Visa card that drew on a World of Warcraft account rather than a fiat currency account. This was photoshopped up to make a point, and at the time it was supposed to be a totally out-of-the-box crazy picture of the future. About two weeks after we made it up, I read that a US bank was issuing a Visa card with cashback in World of Warcraft gold. Oh well. It did help to make one of the points that I was trying to get across, which is that the future of payments will extend beyond the “traditional” bank, consumer, merchant and acquirer for 4-party model.

Vegetable company Green Giant is offering an unlikely reward for purchasing their products: virtual currency in Zynga’s hit social game FarmVille.
[From Wacky: Zynga Gives Away Free FarmVille Cash With Purchases Of Real Life Vegetables]

That was bad timing, coming just as Zynga (the people behind Farmville) caved in to Facebook and agreed to replace Farmville cash with Facebook credits, but it was an interesting development nonetheless, showing that virtual money is just as valuable as “real” money. Facebook’s tactics show they undoubtedly have a strategy in this field.

First Facebook turned off notifications for applications, taking away the primary mechanism for social games to go viral. Now if a company wants a massive audience for a new game, they almost certainly have to buy it through Facebook advertising.

Now Facebook is rolling out Credits as the preferred method of payment for games on their Platform, and taking a 30 per cent cut of the transactions. That’s a much larger percentage than the social games companies were handing over to the small payment companies that had sprung up to fill this niche, and higher than the fees charged by PayPal and credit card companies.
[From Zynga says it’s not leaving Facebook | Tech Blog | FT.com]

Now there’s something to be said for the creation of a single currency area as a way to encourage trade and therefore prosperity.

Besides leading the creation of a more people-centric web, it could also end up having the dominant virtual currency, according to an early adopter of Facebook Credits. PopCap Games has been using the service, which is still in the beta testing phase, as the sole payment method for Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook.

The game is free to play and attracts 11m monthly players, 3m of them playing it daily. PopCap sells extra power-ups, which boost players’ capabilities, and is moving onto sales of virtual items. It has decided to ignore offering other virtual currency options and only accepts Facebook Credits. Users can buy them with credit cards, Paypal or through their mobile phones in $5, $10 and $20 increments for 50, 100 or 200 Credits.
[From Facebook’s Credits Bank of the Web | Tech Blog | FT.com]

These are all useful case studies, showing how a new currency can develop and evolve.

Facebook has certainly tried to guide the development of its online economy, almost in the way that governments seek to influence economic activity in the real world, through fiscal and monetary policy. Earlier this year the firm said it wanted applications running on its platform to accept its virtual currency, known as Facebook Credits. It argued that this was in the interests of Facebook users, who would no longer have to use different online currencies for different applications.
[From Social networks and statehood | The future is another country | Economist.com]

I think I’ve seen the playbook before.

That means all Facebook game developers will be able to start using Credits as their payment system for virtual goods — in fact, Facebook is requiring them to make the switch by July
[From All Facebook Games Will Have To Use Facebook Credits Starting In July]

This comes from the Great Khan’s playbook for monetary and fiscal policy. Not Genghis Khan. His fiscal policy was confused: when he took control of China in 1215, his pacification plan was to kill everyone in China, no small undertaking since China was then, as now, the world’s most populous country. Fortunately, one of his advisors, a man who ought to be the patron saint of Finance Ministers everywhere, Yeliu Ch’uts’ai, pointed out (presumably via a primitive Treasury model of some sort) that dead peasants paid considerably less tax than live ones, and the plan was halted. In 1260, Genghis’ grandson Kublai Khan became Emporer of China. He decided, much as Mark Zuckerberg has, that it was a burden to commerce and taxation to have all sorts of currencies in use, ranging from copper “cash” to iron bars, to pearls to salt to specie, so he decided to implement a paper currency.

Here’s what Marco Polo had to say about it…
[From Digital Money: Lucky, for me anyway]

His monetary policy was refreshingly straightforward and more robust, even, than Mr. Zukerberg’s: if you didn’t accept his money, he would kill you. Naturally, in a short time, the new single currency was established and paper money began to circulate instead of gold, jewels, copper coins and metal bars. If you think talking about a new currency is crazy, take a look at Facebook Deals. According to Facebook, at launch, you will not be able to buy physical goods with Facebook Credits. Rather you will be able to get things like vouchers that you can redeem at events: now this is, frankly, a paper-thin distinction. I can’t use Facebook Credits to pay for, say, a Coke at a pop concert but I can use them to pay for a voucher for a Coke at a pop concert. I am not an economist, but…

When beloved national retailers start offering goods and lower prices to customers who pay with a new, virtual currency – that’s when said virtual currency becomes a force to reckon with. Somebody call Congress and the Federal Reserve – it’s time to start having some serious conversations.
[From Facebook Deals Launches Tonight & Groupon Doesn’t Stand a Chance (Updated)]

There’s a warning from history here! Unfortunately, the Khan’s paper money ended in disaster because the money supply was not managed: it collapsed in hyperinflation, because in the days after Yeliu Ch’uts’ai, the temptation to print money was just too great for the monetary authorities too resist. Let’s hope that the Emperor of Facebook finds an advisor of the calibre of Yeliu Ch’uts’ai.

One possible future might be that, just as China turned in on itself and stagnated, leaving technological and commercial progress to other people, Facebook will become an inward-looking economy while others take up the torch! Perhaps competition in currency, not only in payment methods, is need to keep an economic space vital.

The new program, announced today at SXSW, is called RewardVille, which will give players zPoints and zCoins in CityVille, FrontierVille, FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Zynga Poker, Café World, Treasure Isle, YoVille, PetVille and Vampire Wars.
[From Zynga Rolls Out New Virtual Currency in Addition to Facebook Credits | Tricia Duryee | eMoney | AllThingsD]

Competition. This is the American way, not going complaining to Senator Durbin.

These opinions are my own (I think) and presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]

Top and bottom

4th May 2011by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

I just applied for yet another credit card, this time because I fancied a contactless Amex ExpressPay card to play with (I already have contactless Visa PayWave and contactless MC PayPass cards). When I read this…

MBNA today announced that the first American Express-branded, contactless credit cards in the UK will be issued for use by MBNA’s customers.
[From MBNA introduces contactless Amex card in UK]

…naturally I couldn’t resist applying. The online process was pretty painless, I have to say, and my card is apparently going to arrive in 5-7 business days. Excellent. American Express marketing has been a bit of a theme for me recently. A few days ago the morning’s junk mail included a new special offer from American Express. Now, my British Airways American Express card is my top of wallet card, for about the first four months of the year. That’s because it gives you BA miles — which are not much of an incentive — and a free BA companion ticket — which is a great incentive — once you have spent £10,000 in a year. But you can only have one. So like, I’m sure, many other who travel on business, l spend £10,000 on the BA Amex card to get the companion ticket and then I go back to using my “Middle-Class Maestro”: the John Lewis MasterCard that I pay off in full every month. This delivers an excellent 1% cashback in the form of John Lewis vouchers that are valid in Waitrose.

Anyway, I got some junk mail from Amex which says that if I go and register my Amex card at some website and then use it in eight different stores before the end of June then… sorry, I lost interest at this point and threw it into the recycling bin. It was only when I got home in the evening after a meeting with a card marketing specialist today that I determined to retrieve it and read it. As it transpires, the offer was that if I go and register my card at a particular web site and then I use it in eight of the stores listed in the leaflet before the end of June then I get a bonus 2,400 BA miles. But surely, I thought, their computer would have noticed that I stopped using the card as soon as I had the companion ticket. If BA miles were an incentive to me, then I’d still be using it, so clearly they are not. The bottom line is that I don’t understand card marketing and have absolutely no idea what the marketing people are thinking about when they come up with their special promotions. For example…

KFC outlets have been promoting the cards, ranging in value from $10 to $500 and to be used within 12 months, as a “thoughtful gift idea for any occasion”… Preventative Health Taskforce chair Professor Rob Moodie said he was shocked when he learned about KFC’s latest marketing ploy. “It’s marketing gone berserk,” he said.
[From Fury over $500 KFC gift cards as nation battles obesity crisis | News.com.au]

Personally, I think that marketing may well have started off beserk, but I get his point.

These opinions are my own (I think) and presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]

Some observations on Japan

4th May 2011by Consult Hyperion2 Comments

Someone interrupted one of my rants against cash the other day by pointing out that in the last resort, cash is the only payment mechanism that society can depend on. Their trump card was reference to the aftermath of the recent Japanese cataclysm, where following a magnitude 9 earthquake and a tsunami, the nuclear reactors didn’t melt down but the payment system did.

I think this is wrong lesson to draw from it. Yes, there were some temporary problems with the card networks because of the disruption, but it’s important to note that this did not impact all cards: Japan has quite a rich retail payment landscape, as shown in this diagram (which I drew a couple of years ago, so it’s a bit dated, but you get the point).

I saw Nobuhiko Sugiura, Associate Dean of Chuo University Business School, give a good overview of the current situation at last year’s E-Money, Cards and Payments conference in Moscow. He said that e-money usage in Japan is growing rapidly but still a small fraction of total consumer spending (¥1 trillion out of a total of ¥300 trillion, a 300% increase in the last three years). A third of the population use e-money and half of them (ie, one sixth of the population) use it in their phones. It’s a competitive market, centred on non-banks because the Japanese banks have no real interest in handling small payments because or their cost base. The non-banks, as I’ve often noted on this blog, have different business models, not based on transaction fees. The railways, for example, don’t expect to earn anything from their e-money system, it’s about reducing their costs. In comparison, convenience stores want to issue e-money to reduce their cash float. The bottom line is that the of cash at POS in Japan is “already falling” because of e-money.

After the earthquake and tsunami, the offline electronic money systems (such as Edy and nanoco) carried on working so long as there was power and the backup battery systems or generators were working, so you could still pop round to 7-Eleven and buy your staples. In fact, it was people who kept their money in cash who suffered greatly.

In Japan, lots of people — especially older people — keep their life savings in cash in their homes. (The country’s banks pay very low interest rates, so the incentive to deposit that money into bank accounts is lower than in other countries.) This is all well and good, until a tsunami destroys your home and washes your money out to sea.
[From Schneier on Security: Unanticipated Security Risk of Keeping Your Money in a Home Safe]

That’s not to say that people didn’t want cash after the event.

The tragedy playing out in Japan this past week highlighted that in times of crisis, there’s nothing like cash in hand as the universal method of payment. By all accounts the banking system in Japan survived and is functioning well after the earthquake and tsunami – such is the level of disaster preparedness. But Mizuho, Japan’s second largest bank, reported outages in its payments and ATM networks – coincidentally as demand for cash surged.
[From The end of cash for payments? Not so fast! – Microsoft Perspectives on Payments and Core Banking in Financial Services – Site Home – MSDN Blogs]

So they wanted cash, but did they need it? In this kind of catastrophe, where the online POS network goes down but the ATM network stays up and the ATMs remain stocked with notes, you could see people going and withdrawing cash. But suppose there are no ATMs?

Imagine that there was a magnitude 9 earthquake and a tsunami in Woking (unlikely – our last natural disaster was an ice age in 18,000 BCE) and when I go round to Waitrose to buy some bottled water and rice my John Lewis MasterCard proves useless because the acquiring network is down and the ATM proves useless because the ATM has no power. The store manager at Waitrose can leave the food to rot on the shelves or he can accept a signed IOU. He could accept no sale because of flaws in the electronic payments or he could develop a rational fall-back strategy. We discussed this a couple of years ago, with reference to the famous case study of the Irish bank strike.

The owners of shops and pubs knew their customers very well and so were perfectly capable of deciding whether to accept cheques (or just IOUs) from those customers. And since the customers also knew each other very well, they too could make sensible decisions about which paper to accept.
[From Digital Money: Payments without banks]

If I was the manager of Waitrose after the Woking earthquake, then I would simply accept payment by writing down card numbers, or photocopying driving licences, or taking pictures of customers, or whatever. The core of the issue is identification and trust, not the payment instrument. As many media commentators noted, society in Japan did not collapse. My conclusion: natural disasters are not a convincing argument for cash.

By the way, I case anyone was wondering about the origami cranes that I was giving out in Chicago this morning… My wife is a teaching assistant in a primary school in Surrey. The seven year old brother of one of the boys who was in her class (they boys have a Japanese mother) has been spending two hours every day for the last month making these (they are a symbol of peace in Japan) to raise money for the British Red Cross appeal for Japanese tsunami victims. Consult Hyperion have purchased a hundred of these beautiful and special cranes, so if you come to our office anytime over the next couple of weeks, please feel free to pick one up with our compliments.

These opinions are my own (I think) and presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]

Cash and machines

27th April 2011by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

In a comment on an article about mobile payments that I was reading, I noticed that someone wrote

I hate it when a retailer tells me they don’t accept cards. I feel like I have to remind them what year they’re living in. They usually prompt me to use an ATM within their store and accept a 2 dollar or more fee just to get the cash to pay for a candy bar. This results in me leaving the store and finding a 7-11 or some such thing.
[From Paying by phone is insecure and unnecessary. – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine]

It seems to me that this is the market at work, and I don’t see a problem with that. If some retailers and some customers want to carry on using cash, then fine, let them, but don’t make me pay for it. So long as they are paying the full cost and I’m not subsidising them, so what? (Actually, there is a so what which is to do with the impact on society, but that’s not my point here.) But then I began to wonder why the store would need an ATM at all. Wouldn’t costs be reduced for everyone if the customer could use their ATM card to withdraw money from the retailer’s cash draw? This is the sort of thing that is going on in India.

As a part of the ambitious Unique Identity (UID) card project, a micro-ATM will be a payment platform that would make use of mobile technology and the customers’ UID will serve the ‘know your customer’ (KYC) norms required by the bank to open an account.
[From Banks take to the shrinking cash machine – dnaindia.com]

The micro-ATM is a POS terminal-with-knobs-on so that customers can make “ATM” withdrawals at agents but also open accounts and carry out other basic functions. Presumably these don’t cost the merchants much more (if any more) than regular POS terminals and they must cost less than an ATM, so everyone’s better offer, except for ATM manufacturers.

Perhaps we should stop looking at these band-aids to slap over cash’s inefficiency though. It’s time to get tough. According to recent research by McKinsey and Wincor-Nixdorf (who make, amongst other things, ATMs), cash “in circulation” from the US to Europe through to Asia Pacific is increasing year-on-year,which has resulted in the global cost of handling cash increasing to more than US$300 billion, and retailers bear the brunt of those cash handling costs compared to banks, cash-in-transit operators,cash centers and central banks. As much as 61% is attributed to the cost of handling, transporting and securing cash in the checkout zone and back office of a retail store compared with 32% for a retail bank. Incidentally, I thought I remembered seeing that $300 billion figure a few months ago, and it turns out I did.

Eckard Heidloff, president and CEO of Wincor Nixdorf and Dr. Karsten Ottenburg, chairman of the management board and CEO of Giesecke & Devrient, noted that $300 billion is spent annually on cash processing worldwide. And since the euro’s introduction, the number of banknotes in circulation in euro-member countries has increased 8 percent yearly.
[From Wincor Nixdorf and Giesecke & Devrient form a partnership | ATM Marketplace]

Banknotes “in circulation” going up 8%, while retail sales went up, what, 1% last year? What on Earth are people are these banknotes for? Earlier in the recession, the Bank of England put forward a theory:

As a share of nominal GDP, the value of notes in circulation declined from 6% in 1970 to a low point of 2.4% in the mid-1990s but has since stabilised and then increased, noticeably over the past two years… Rising demand for notes might reflect some loss of confidence in banks and very low interest rates, which reduce the opportunity cost of holding banknotes as a non-interest bearing asset. Andrew Bailey says that is “…pretty good prima facie evidence that there has been an increase in demand for banknotes as a store of value”.
[From Bank of England|Publications|News|2009|Banknotes in Circulation – Still Rising: What Does This Mean for the Future of Cash? Speech by Andrew Bailey, 6 December 2009]

Yes, but a store of value for who? Certainly not for a normal, law-abiding taxpayer like me. Does anyone you know keep cash at home now instead of leaving it in the bank? This isn’t a purely European phenomenon, since the amount of cash has been going up in the USA as well.

The quantity of US currency in circulation in the world was $2776 per US resident in April 2009. That’s a lot of currency – the stock held at any point in time is about 6% of US annual GDP. In case you think that’s all held overseas, a study by the Bank of Canada (in the Bank of Canada Review – look it up) shows that Canadian currency outstanding is about 3% of annual Canadian GDP, and most of that has to be in Canada.
[From Stephen Williamson: New Monetarist Economics: The Use of Currency]

These figures seem about right: the US has far more currency out there per person, because more than half of all US currency isn’t in circulation in the US and will never be repatriated, so in the UK, Canada and the US we see approximately the same figure, that M0 is 3% of M4.

These opinions are my own (I think) and presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]

Innovation is technology-enabled

26th April 2011by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

Around the world, when faced with new products in the payments space, banks naturally crank up their innovation departments and produce super new products and services to wow customers back. I’m joking, of course. What they actually do in many countries is to going whining to the regulator and force competitors to use the banks’ legacy infrastructure. This is what just happened in India, which really ought to be a huge and dynamic market for e-, m- and new payments of many kinds.

Consequently, from 1 March, the eBay unit says merchants in India cannot receive payments from abroad of over $500 per transaction. In addition, merchants will no longer be able to use any balance in their PayPal accounts to buy goods or services. Instead all payments must be transferred into Indian bank accounts first.
[From Finextra: RBI forces PayPal to restrict payments to Indian merchants]

Now, I’m not saying that banks are the only people who react to innovation in this way: that is, by trying to stop it. This goes on all the time.

For the last fifty years, hard disks have been increasingly super-charged gramophone records: at their heart, there is still a real disk rotating very fast on a real spindle. That’s not the only way to store data, as the memory stick revolution shows, but until now, solid state drives (which have no moving parts) have been too small and expensive to replace traditional hard disks as the main storage device for a computer. Now that’s changing, with real advantages for users as a result… Seagate’s response is to threaten to sue all the new entrants for patent infringement, while insisting that their existing market is not threatened.
[From Public Strategy: Innovator’s irony]

At the dawn of the industrial revolution, the steam engine delivered the fundamental business school case study in this topic, something that I wrote about when I was invited to speak at the European Patent Forum back in 2009.

In his keynote address, the Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek said that we had to find a balance in the intellectual property system, that it was right to let Stevenson patent his steam engine but not the screwdriver he used to build it (he didn’t explain why..).
[From Patent error | 15Mb: yet another blog from Dave Birch]

In fact, as I discussed in this post, history teaches the opposite lesson because the patent system held back the evolution of the steam engine for a generation! But back to our business. What kind of innovation is relevant to the payments industry? This is not clear to me. On the one hand, it seems reasonable to say that…

What would be refreshing is if the focus of innovation could be pegged to the value that it delivers to the entire ecosystem, not just the engineers who get a kick out of building cool new toys.
[From Payment Gadgets at The Catalyst Code]

But is this true? When Apple put together the iPod, it didn’t benefit the “entire ecosystem”. The disruptive innovations in fact devastate parts of the ecosystem, like forest fires that allow new shoots to grow. I hate to harp on about the M-PESA example, but I think it illustrates this point well. The banks complained about M-PESA and tried to stop it but fortunately failed. Now that M-PESA has 13m customers and 20,000 agents, the banks are able to deliver new services to new customers using the platform. Were they devastated by the forest fire? No: it gave them space for new shoots as well.

Where do we look for the next new shoots then? Not in banks, generally speaking, but elsewhere in the ecosystem. The payment innovations to come will be technology-enabled, which is why it’s important for businesses throughout that ecosystem to understand the new technologies relevant to payments and, just as importantly, understand the business model ramifications of seemingly dreary technology architecture decisions being made by nerds right now. While they will be technology-enabled, though, it’s the sustainable new business model that is the key. A good example of this is Square.

..if Square can provide just enough added-value with their app to get traction in the small business sector (they are already processing a million dollars a day), then when new payment technologies come along (eg, NFC phones that can accept payments from contactless cards) the merchants will just expect Square to handle them for them. We have long been advising clients that the key disruptive role of mobile phones in the payments world is the ability to take payments, not to make them.
[From Digital Money: Hip to be Square]

And we still do, in fact. I think Square is an interesting innovation case study. It does not compete with existing acquirers, but opens up the market so that more people can accept card payments.

So where is Square seeing the most traction? Without a doubt, small businesses, independent workers and merchants comprise most of Square’s rapidly growing user base. The technology only requires its tiny credit card scanner that fits into your audio jack and Square’s app. The device and the software are free, but Square takes a small percentage of each transaction (2.75% plus 15 cents for swiped transactions).
[From Square Now Processing Millions Of Dollars In Mobile Transactions Every Week | TechGoo]

In a way, this is a real-world PSP and an fascinating niche play in a large volume-driven acquiring market, one that can be seen to adumbrate mobile disruption and our projection that the mobile-phone-as-POS meme will be more revolutionary than the mobile-phone-as-card meme. But there’s something else to it as well. Conventional acquirers use conventional methods to assess applications.

Square’s qualification rules are more relaxed than those of standard credit card processors, There are no initiation fees, monthly minimums, and when merchants apply for a reader, Square doesn’t just focus on a credit check, but also takes into account the influence a company holds on Yelp, Twitter or Facebook.
[From Square Now Processing Millions Of Dollars In Mobile Transactions Every Week | TechGoo]

That, it seems to me, is more of a window into the coming economy based on the reputation interweb (or web 3.1, as I propose to call it, to avoid clashing with web 3.0). Can you imagine Barclays Business or Streamline giving you a merchant acquiring account according to the number of twitter followers you have rather than your trading history or bank references?

By the way, I can’t remember if I’ve blogged this before but one of my favourite stories about accepting merchants for acquiring accounts goes back more than a decade to the hazy days before the LastMinute flotation. I was doing some work over at what was then NatWest Capital Markets, who had invested millions in Lastminute, when they went beserk because NatWest Streamline wouldn’t give LastMinute a credit card acquiring account because it didn’t have two years’ trading history!

These opinions are my own (I think) and presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]

Contactless in chaos

18th April 2011by Consult Hyperion3 Comments

When I was in Singapore a few days ago I went to Starbucks in the conference centre where the Cards Asia and NFC World Asia events were being held, accompanied by senior executive from major international financial services organisation (SEXMIF) to get a coffee. When we got there, I noticed a contactless terminal, proudly advertising that it preferred Citibank cards. We ordered a couple of coffees and the delightful young clerk smiled and cheerfully asked for $8.40 or whatever it was. After a theatrical flourish of my splendid contactless Visa card I triumphantly tapped it against the reader. Nothing. I tapped it again. Nothing. I told the attendant that I wanted to pay with contactless. Ah, he pointed out, you can’t because it’s not a Citibank card. I politely explained that it was a Visa card, and there was a Visa logo prominently displayed on the reader. He went off to get his supervisor.

The super appeared to see the problem. Ah, he pointed out, the terminal isn’t ready. He proceeded to re-key the transaction into another POS terminal (they had three: two for cards, as far as I could see, and one for NETS, the domestic contactless purse.)

Nothing. The terminal still didn’t display the invitation to tap and go, although the blue light was on. He told me to tap the card. I told him that it would be pointless, because the terminal wasn’t in the correct state. He insisted. I tapped. Nothing happened. SEXMIF, who was videoing all of this on his phone, presumably so that he could show his management the future of consumer payments, was having trouble keeping the camera still while laughing at me.

We cancelled the transaction out and tried again. It still didn’t work. I rummaged for my trusty Travelex pre-paid MasterCard and paid by swipe. Remember, I do this so you don’t have to.

Not only was using contactless not quicker than paying with cash, it was not quicker than paying with a cheque. Nor, for the matter, was it quicker than walking across the mall to an ATM, drawing out the cash, walking back and paying with a S$50 bill and getting the change in 5-cent coins. What a joke. It’s almost as if a double-agent from the cash-in-transit (CIT) industry has gone under deep cover and is now working for the banks, sabotaging the deployment of contactless from the very heart of the industry. After all, what consumer is going to try tapping their phone on this terminal after they’ve had these experiences with contactless cards?

The next day, on my own, and refusing to accept that contactless deployment had been damaged beyond repair by the combined actions of the acquirers and merchants, I went into another Starbucks to try again. I asked for a Latte (with an extra shot this time) and then asked if I could pay by contactless. The guy told me I needed a “white card” (I think this is what he said). I wasn’t sure what he meant, so I confidently pointed to the Visa logo on my UK Barclays debit card and, expressing full confidence in the global brand promise that has made Visa what it is today, I prepared to tap. He rekeyed the transaction, and, ta da!, the terminal lit up. I tapped! The light went amber, then green! He handed me a receipt that confirmed an offline EMV no-CVM debit transaction, and I wheeled away in triumph.

But the clerk called me back. He told me that they have to swipe the card, even when the customer has paid by contactless. I was incredulous. But he was insistent. I asked him why. He said that they had to. I told him I was sure that wasn’t the case, but he insisted, and by now my use of contactless had caused a queue to build up. I didn’t want to embarrass him — it’s not his fault — but I was really curious what they needed the swipe for. So I handed over my Travelex MasterCard, and he swiped that. It charged me for the coffee again. I looked at both receipts, astonished. Then I gave him back the Travelex card and had him unwind the transaction, then gave him my debit card and he swiped that, for a reason that wasn’t clear to me. When I got home, I logged in to both accounts to see what had transpired. Nothing had been posted to the Barclays account three days after this, and when I tried to log in to Travelex it said “site down for maintenance”. Oh well.

For reference, this is what should happen in the retail environment if a retailer wants to cut cash handling, speed up serving times and increase the average spend: I ask for a coffee, the guy rings up S$6.40 and the terminal lights up, clearly displaying “6.40” and then I tap it with my card/phone and the light goes green and that’s it done. End of transaction.

In all conscience

14th April 2011by Consult Hyperion1 Comment

I’m giving a keynote at the Smart Card Alliance conference in Chicago in a couple of weeks. It’s going to be about EMV in the USA. I’ve just been mulling it over, and once again looked at Deborah Baxley’s neat summary of the immediate future for the US cards business:

Banks scrambling to replace lost fee revenue will likely shift focus to credit and prepaid, impose DDA and other fees, along with new account services and comprehensive pricing packages.
[From Changing the Game in Cards – pymnts.com]

It’s not just banks who have to rethink their strategies because of developments in the payment sector. I note that in the UK, according to the Centre for Economics & Business Research reported in Fraud Watch 6(18), nearly 100,000 people were victims of direct debt fraud last year, a direct consequence of the use of chip and PIN at retail POS. As card fraud has become more difficult, the criminals have shifted their focus. Direct debit fraud was one basis point of identity fraud cases a decade ago, now it is a tenth of all cases. Criminals have to adapt to chip and PIN just as banks and merchants do.

A GROUP of seven postmen intercepted letters containing credit cards, switched the microchips of the cards with fake ones and then delivered them to the applicants… the syndicate also had the help of a National Registration Department (NRD) officer who supplied them with the names of the mothers of the real credit card applicants
[From 7 M’sian postmen nabbed for credit card fraud]

It’s interesting to think like a criminal. Well, sometimes. In Chicago, two men were shot by guards while trying to rob a cash transit.

The dead suspect was identified as Jimmy Townsend, 52… a convicted felon and was sentenced to 10 years in prison for two separate armed robbery convictions.
[From 2 suspects shot, one fatally, in armored truck heist – Chicago Breaking News]

Armed robbery is a bizarre crime. I think I’m right in saying that in the UK the average sentence is longer than that for murder. In the US, Mr. Townsend spent years in jail for it, and then got killed doing it again. How dumb did he have to be go back to trying to rob armoured cars. If only he read the Digital Money Blog, he would have known that there are much easier targets.

The heavily-armed gang made off with the tournament jackpot of 242,000 euros ($327,000; £217,000) in early March. Police said a 28-year-old Lebanese man, the fourth arrested in connection with the raid, had been detained on Sunday.
[From BBC News – German police arrest poker tournament heist suspect]

OK, so not all of them got away, but casinos are not a bad idea for enterprising criminals. They do have lots of cash, and often the people in them will not report cash as stolen.

Masked men have stormed a packed casino near the Swiss border city of Basel, making off with hundreds of thousands of francs, prosecutors say.

About 10 raiders pulled up at the Grand Casino in two cars just after 0400 (0200 GMT) and smashed their way in, brandishing machine-guns and pistols. The French-speaking gang ordered the 600 guests and employees to the floor while they emptied registers.
[From BBC News – Switzerland casino is robbed by armed gang]

Criminals follow the path of least resistance. I hope Bankerstuff don’t mind me quoting from a marketing e-mail they sent me concerning a forthcoming webinar.

A Former Bank Robber Shares Security Insights During Live Webinar on April 28 from 2:00 – 3:00pm Eastern

Troy Evans pursued a career as a self-employed addict, drug dealer, gambler and thief for more than 15 years. Ultimately, his disregard of values and discipline resulted in a 13 year federal prison sentence. Facing the obstacles, pressures and violence of prison life, he was determined that his time behind bars would not be wasted… Having met and interviewed over 300 bank and credit union robbers he is able to give us a “look into the mind of the enemy”. Troy answers questions such as… What can financial institutions do to deter a desperate criminal?

I would have thought than an obvious idea would be to not have any cash since, as another bank robber famously remarked, he went “where the money is”? When it comes to card payments, the money is in getting hold of card details and (because of the switch to chip and PIN) PINs. Here, the criminals soon adapted their strategies to deal with the new instruments.

Victorian Police believe international crime syndicates are bribing shop workers in return for access to EFTPOS terminals as part of an elaborate scam. They believe criminals have stolen as much as $80 million from Australian bank accounts over the past year…

The syndicates install cameras in ceilings to film people entering their identification numbers.
[From EFTPOS scam costs Australians $80m – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)]

They’re using these PINs (since they can’t make counterfeit chip and PIN cards) with the card details to withdraw cash from ATMs. Once all of the cards and ATMs are chip-only, this avenue will be closed to them. Thus while chip and PIN isn’t perfect, it’s good enough to push criminals into other channels. So: a thought experiment…

Suppose we improve the security of payment systems to the point where they cannot, effectively, be broken. Theft, fraud and hacking are not possible. Where would criminals go next? I think they’re spoilt for choice, so relatively small improvements in payment security would send them off to pasture news.

The poll of 533 firms shows that 55% experienced fraud in the last 12 months, with 61% of these hit more than once, a similar picture to the previous year. In total, 75% of the businesses participating in the study experienced online account takeover and/or online fraud.
[From Finextra: Account takeover fraud plaguing US small businesses]

SME account takeover seems much easier than armed robbery and much more profitable. The so-called man-in-the-middle attacks on OTP systems for remote access to baking accounts are an established attack vector.

According to BillingScore, 19.4% of the value of all transactions in the U.K. premium rate sector are fraudulent, or roughly £1 on every £5 spent. “With the premium rate sector in the U.K. mobile industry currently worth in the region of £700 million, this equates to £135.8 million per year being lost to fraud in the U.K. alone,” the company said.
[From UK mobile operators ‘hide’ £136m annual fraud loss]

A fifth? As opposed to a few bp in cards? I predict that any forward-looking criminal in this scenario will be eyeing up the telecommunications opportunities. So let’s look at what some forward-looking criminals are doing. I think criminals in eastern Europe are a useful barometer, because they tend to be well-educated and computer-savvy. And they get arrested for time to time so we can see what they get up to. Here’s the stash of Romanian hackers arrested last year. You will, of course, note that it does not include low maximum balance prepaid cards or accounts.

77,350 euros, 49,000 U.S. dollars, 64,860 pounds, 60,645 lei, a luxury watch, a rifle, three pistols and 150 grams of gold. 70 laptops, 165 mobile phones, 35 desktop computers, 15 modems, new servers, 10 blank cards, 2425 SIM cards…
[From CyberCrime & Doing Time: Nicolae Popescu, Romanian hacker, at large!]

So not only the usual euros and dollars, but also gold (clearly the hackers were diversifying) and also two-and-a-half thousand SIM cards. Two-and-a-half thousand! Here are people taking the messages of convergence, future-proofing and cloud payments quite seriously. As Eric Schmidt said when still with Google, if you don’t have a mobile strategy then you don’t have a strategy. Now, if you’re like me, you will wonder what on Earth they are going to do with these SIMs. Then I remembered something that I’d read a while ago.

Only days after almost two million Bulgarians registered their SIM cards, the Interior Ministry warns that new forms of abuse are appearing. According to the ministry, two cases had recently been uncovered in which telephone fraudsters had allegedly offered 50 leva to Romas for registered SIM cards, Bulgarian daily Standard reported… the Interior Ministry as saying that it expected a flood of SIM cards, registered to Romas and homeless people, to appear on the market in the coming weeks.
[From Interior Ministry warns of trade in registered pre-paid SIM cards – Bulgaria – The Sofia Echo]

Mystery solved. The answer to why there should be a significant value attached to SIM cards that you can buy for virtually nothing in any shop is, naturally, government policy. After pocketing their windfalls from selling their SIM cards, the homeless and Roma presumably went off to celebrate their good fortune, whereas the criminals went off to figure out how to create a mass supply instead of having to negotiate with individuals.

…only four months into 2010, and organised crime groups already have found ways of beating the system. In fact, there are unsuspecting people right now who are completely unaware that their mobile phones, or names and registration, are being used for serious criminal activities… Radio host Borislav Borissov found out that he was the “proud owner” of about 200 different SIM cards, all registered to his name and personal social security number.
[From Bulgarian criminals ‘beating the system’ of pre-paid SIM card registration – Bulgaria – The Sofia Echo]

I know where I’d invest my criminal dollars! Mobile is the future! No, of course, I’m just joking to make a point. If I really was going to invest dollars in a criminal enterprise, it would be in Somali pirates, except for one sticking point. I’m afraid my strict ethical position will not allow me to deal with these people.

The al Shabaab group, which professes loyalty to al Qaeda, said mobile money transfers (MMT) helped feed Western capitalism and were turning Somalia’s Muslims against Islamic banking practices.
[From Somalia’s al Shabaab bans mobile money transfers | Top News | Reuters]

I cannot do sufficient violence to my conscience to support a group who are against mobile payments.

These opinions are my own (I think) and presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]

Licensed operators

13th April 2011by Consult Hyperion1 Comment

France has been in the forefront of the NFC revolution, with an early commitment to cross-industry co-operation, considerable work on standards and models and an aggressive timetable for getting phones into the market. Remember this?

A dozen French cities plan to launch wide-scale contactless payment and information service on mobile phones with the backing of the ministry of industry, reports Les Echos. The city projects approved under the initiative will receive state assistance for consultancy and engineering, but no other subsidies are planned at this stage.
[From Aid from French Ministry of Industry for mobile contactless cities. « Contactless & NFC City League]

You will undoubtedly recall that a few months later, the French mobile operators decided to get together with a processor and form a mobile payments proposition to launch a serious assault on the banks’ retail payment franchise.

Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom et Atos Origin créent une société commune pour proposer une plate-forme unique de paiement en ligne, sécurisée par le mobile.
[From Union sacrée des opérateurs mobiles dans le paiement sur Internet – OPERATEUR DE TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICES INFORMATIQUES ATOS ORIGIN FRANCE TELECOM SFR BOUYGUES TELECOM]

Well they’ve made their first assault on the enemy positions and have been granted a PI licence. Why would they bother, you might wonder, when polls show that the majority of consumers don’t want to use mobile payments?

The 59% of consumers who were against the idea, meanwhile, gave their reasons as: Security (79%)
[From Most French consumers not in favour of mobile payments • NFC World]

The answer is, of course, that consumers don’t know what they are talking about and it’s a waste of time asking them about anything new. Whatever they might say a priori, in all of the pilots and trials that we have been involved in, they really, really, liked mobile proximity.

But there are some real issues, and we need to address them.

Dead phone batteries. Wrong merchant terminals. Terminals turned off. Terminals unrepaired. No terminals at all.

These and other, less obvious glitches suggest contactless technology may not be the mobile payments panacea for tattered magnetic stripes and other problems with plastic cards.
[From Mobile Payments Inheriting the Problems of Contactless – American Banker Article]

Well, yes and no. (I am a consultant, after all). Let’s have a look at these

Dead phone batteries. NFC is interoperable with the existing contactless payments and ticketing systems. As you may have noticed, your Oyster card doesn’t have a battery in it: that’s because it is powered through the electromagnetic field of the terminal you touch it to, and the same is true for the NFC interfaces in phones: if the phone has no battery you may not be able to access your m-wallet to check your transactions, redeem coupons and so on, but you will be able to to use it pay in a shop and ride the subway.

Wrong merchant terminals. I don’t think this will an issue. Right now there are some problems with some cards not being accepted in some terminals, but this is the result of standards problems three or four years ago. The contactless EMV standard should interoperate seamlessly. Some of the terminals are certainly “wrong” from the point of view of consumer experience, but that’s a different thing.

Terminals turned off. Fair enough, I do see this from time-to-time. But it’s a teething problem. There is a problem with terminals being turned off after the merchant has rung up the purchase and then having press some more buttons to turn it on, but that’s an implementation issue.

Terminals unrepaired. I don’t think this is a long term problem. Contactless terminals (since they have no slot or contacts) are considerable more reliable in practice than contact or stripe terminals. Experience from other sectors suggests to me tha tthe cost of maintaining an estate of contactless terminals is less than half the cost of maintaining an estate of conventional terminals.

No terminals at all. This, I think, is the real problem. When I was last in the US, I saw contactless terminals in places where they didn’t really have much impact, like in CVS. But in the places where contactless would have really helped and speeded things up — BART machines, airport carts, Coke machines and so on — nothing.

The point is, that those are real issues that do need dealing with, whereas what the public says are their concerns, such as about the security are, in my opinion, not real issues and it should be handled through marketing communications. Oh, wait…

85% of users said they considered the protocols for operating with the NFC system to be sufficiently secure.
[From Sitges trial results: Consumers pay more often and spend more with NFC phones than with cards • NFC World]

This must be a translation from Spanish, because I’m not sure that “protocols for operating with the NFC system” translates properly in English, but it’s good news all the same. I’m not saying that everything is perfect in the NFC world. Even in France, where progress has been slow despite the commitment of major banks and operators. It’s still a new technology.

The problems are one of the main reasons bank Crédit Mutuel-CIC has held back on launching its m-payment service, according to Patrice Hertzog, payment systems manager for Crédit Mutuel-CIC. He said it has been difficult for the bank’s trusted service manager, Gemalto, to set up and manage the bank’s PayPass application on SIM cards produced by other vendors, such as Oberthur Technologies.

The problems have occurred despite much standards work by the French Association Française du Sans Contact Mobile, or AFSCM, and prior trials involving multiple French banks, mobile operators and vendors.
[From ‘Open’ Battles Break Out Among NFC Vendors Over Android | NFC Times – Near Field Communication and all contactless technology.]

To be honest, this suggests that vendors are not building TSMs from scratch based on the new standards but are putting wrappers around their existing card personalisation systems. That sort of thing is, to me, more of a real issue than incorrectly worrying about what the public think, but whatever. Things are moving. Even in the US, the new technology is getting a foothold and there will soon be TSMs there too.

The joint venture formed by U.S. mobile carriers to launch NFC-based mobile payment… has selected France-based Gemalto to download and manage payment and other secure applications on NFC phones to be used in pilots expected to be held in three to four cities during the second half of 2011
[From U.S. Carrier Joint Venture Chooses a Trusted Service Manager | NFC Times – Near Field Communication and all contactless technology.]

There’s plenty of activity in the US as elsewhere, and since I’ve been looking at the US for clients recently I was interested to read about the work done by the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Boston. This work suggests that the success factors for the US will rest on the evolution of an open eco system for NFC.

The mobile infrastructure would likely be based on Near Field Communications (NFC) contactless technology resident in a smart phone and merchant terminals.

Ubiquitous platforms for mobile should leverage existing rails, including the ACH network for non-card payments, and support new payment types that meet emerging needs.
Some form of dynamic data authentication would be at the heart of a layered mobile payments security and fraud mitigation program.

Standards would be designed, adopted, and complied with through an industry certification program to ensure both domestic and global interoperability, including a standard to ensure that devices used to facilitate mobile payments do not create any electronic interference problems.

A better understanding of a regulatory oversight model should be developed in concert with bank and non-bank regulators early in the effort to clarify compliance responsibilities.

Trusted Service Managers should oversee the provision of interoperable and shared security elements used in the mobile phone.
[From Mobile Payments in the United States Mapping Out the Road Ahead – Boston Fed]

On that final point, things are already moving.

The joint venture formed by U.S. mobile carriers to launch NFC-based mobile payment… has selected France-based Gemalto to download and manage payment and other secure applications on NFC phones to be used in pilots expected to be held in three to four cities during the second half of 2011
[From U.S. Carrier Joint Venture Chooses a Trusted Service Manager | NFC Times – Near Field Communication and all contactless technology.]

So there’s plenty of activity in the US as elsewhere and plenty of organisations are looking at how the move to mobile proximity may impact their businesses.

A white paper that outlines the survey findings, including how the most forward-thinking financial institutions are building a business case for mobile payments, is available at http://www.fiserv.com/mobilestrategy.
[From Forward-Looking Financial Institutions Focused on Mobile Payments Business Case, Says Fiserv Survey – pymnts.com]

I couldn’t help but think, as I read this, that the very act of building a business case for something like this is fundamentally backward-looking, trying to shoehorn something that is the basis of a new value network into the existing business models. The report says that the factors that the FIs evaluated across these business lines included customer retention and profitability, cost reduction, revenue generation and retention, increased customer engagement and competitive parity. When I looked at the revenue generation part of it, though, it only referred to revenue generation in terms of debit card transactions and keeping the connection to the DDA. This isn’t how forward-looking organisations are thinking about revenue generation from mobile payments, they are thinking about delivering entirely new products and services that are simply not possible in conventional (ie, card) environments, generating revenue from things that banks don’t do.

Google is to run tests of mobile payments at stores in New York and San Francisco in the summer, according to anonymous sources cited by Bloomberg. The search engine giant will pay for installation of thousands of NFC cash-register systems from VeriFone Systems at merchant locations, one source told the wire.
[From Finextra: Google to run commercial trials of NFC at the POS – Bloomberg]

Well, well. So while financial institutions are agonising over the business case, Google is giving out the terminals for free. It’s not hard to see why: they don’t care about the miniscule margins on the payment transaction and arguing about how to slide and dice the merchant fee, they care about building new business around knowing who is buying what and where. So leadership in the NFC space is may well shift away from the payment incumbents. Perhaps the answer to the age-old question about whether banks or operators would control the mobile payments space is… neither.

Black Wednesday

11th April 2011by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

They called April 6th “Black Wednesday” in the UK. Well, I heard someone say that on the BBC. It’s because it was the start of the new tax year, and since the government maxed out the credit card, the payments are going up. There’s going to be some pressure to collect to more tax, because there’s a limit to how much you can put the rates up before avoidance (and emigration) reduces the total amount collected. I wonder if we will soon be going down the Greek route.

The Greek government announced Thursday it is shutting down bars and nightclubs… that fail to offer receipts. So far, six bars and clubs have been shut down as par of a broader sweep where two-thirds of all inspected businesses were fined. The absence of receipts allows businesses to avoid value added tax, or consumption tax, the Ministry of Finance said in a press release.
[From Euro Debt Crisis – Cash-Strapped Greece Cracks Down on Fun – CNBC]

Now this could be good for the e-payments industry, because the easiest away to avoid receipts and therefore evade tax is to pay in cash. Here, in the birthplace of income tax, the government are apparently going to have something of a crackdown on tax evasion.

HMRC has targeted so-called ‘ash cash’ or payments to doctors for signing death certificates before bodies can be cremated and also undeclared cash payments to dentists.
[From HMRC targets middle class tax evaders – Telegraph Blogs]

This seems on the margin to me: I shouldn’t think the amount of tax being evaded by doctors writing death certificates will amount to one payoff of a local government official and I have to say that none of my dentists has ever asked me for a cash payment for anything.

It could even be argued that agreeing to pay your builder in cash might be seen as a conspiracy to defraud the Revenue
[From HMRC targets middle class tax evaders – Telegraph Blogs]

Now you’re talking! Agreeing to pay your builder in cash is precisely engaging in a conspiracy to evade tax, and people who do it should be prosecuted. If they paid their share, mine wouldn’t be so much.

And it’s not just that carrying around cash is inconvenient and time consuming. These days, one of its main functions is to finance the black economy: drug deals, counterfeiting, under-the-table employment and other nefarious activities. Because cash is anonymous, people can easily opt out of the taxable economy – leaving the rest of us to pick up the tab for their use of public services.
[From I’m dreaming of a cashless Christmas – Telegraph]

Getting rid of cash won’t eradicate tax evasion, but it will make it more difficult, and hopefully more expensive, thus shifting otherwise black commerce back into the formal economy. And since the scale of tax evasion in Europe is so colossal, small improvements will deliver significant sums to the treasuries. I couldn’t find a reasonable estimate for this in the most recent tax year, but I did find this estimate for VAT alone.

The current collection model brings with it a VAT Gap due to e.g. VAT fraud, insolvencies, mistakes by the taxable persons in the VAT return and VAT avoidance schemes. Desk research shows that the VAT Gap for 2009 can be cautiously estimated at 6,9% of GDP and 12% of total VAT liability in the EU-27. This means that, in the EU-27, a total of EUR 118,8 billion has according to those estimates not been collected by the tax authorities in 2009.
[From 118,8bn euros lost in 2009]

Let’s say that 20 billion of this is in the UK, and that getting rid of cash would cut it by a quarter. That’s an instant five billion bonus to the exchequer. I look forward to my rebate.

Waiting for ages

8th April 2011by Consult HyperionLeave a comment

A few years ago, I was thinking about how to relate the changing technology of money to changes in money, and I thought it would be useful to have some rough categorisation to organise thoughts. At the time, I wrote this:

The era of Money 3.0 is just beginning. Its central dynamic is no longer connectivity (since everything is connected to everything else) but community.
[From Digital Money: Money 3.0]

After a while, I realised that my initial categorisation was insufficiently granular to organise all of the thoughts I had on the topic and all of the information I had gathered on the topic. (I’m thinking of writing a book about it, which is why I have been gathering a lot of material on the specific topic of the technology of money.) A little while ago I posted a more sophisticated idea for a categorisation of the ages of money, or money eras. This extended the framework from three to five “eras”.

Our current era, Money 4.0, can be dated in retrospect to 1971 when Richard Nixon finally ended the gold standard and Visa introduced the Base 1 network for authenticating card payments based on the magnetic stripe. Money 4.0 is bits about bits, but we still apply the wrong mental model, and imagine it to be bits about atoms.
[From Digital Money: Another go at categorising money technologies]

This led me to describe the future as a new age of money, Money 5.0 I suppose, where the abstraction becomes complete and there are wholly new kinds of money that are not based on debt (or, indeed, anything else ultimately tangible) or secured in some conventional way but on relationships. Having had a bit of feedback on this, I think it serves its purpose. Obviously, some aspects are a little arbitrary — starting the information revolution in 1871 — but I think I can support the dating of the communications revolution to 1971, since this is roughly when company size peaked in the UK (actually it was in 1973), and anyway it fits nicely with the narrative of the 100 year interlude that I contend still constrains our mental models of what money is and how it works.

This categorisation leads me to think that we should be looking for Money 5.0 where we see private bits, not bits about anything, becoming a means of exchange. Why private bits? Well, at this year’s Digital Money Forum, we had a wonderful session on private currency, chaired by the economist Diane Coyle.

This morning I had the privilege of chairing a fascinating session at the Digital Money Forum run each year by Dave Birch of Consult Hyperion. The speakers were Professor George Selgin of the University of Georgia, and James Turk of the Gold Money Foundation. Both were arguing, from different perspectives, for private money as a competitor to government money.
[From The Enlightened Economist :: Good money, digital or analogue]

George gave a superb talk on the way in which the industrial revolution in England was hampered by a lack of circulating means of exchange, so private companies stepped in to develop new forms of industrial means of exchange (copper tokens) that help commerce and trade to grow to the great benefit of the nation. It strikes me that we are now in a similar position: we have had the post-industrial revolution but we are still using industrial money and it is holding us back. This is why the virtual empires, such as Facebook, have gone on to produce wholly private currencies — everything from the Everquest Platinum Pieces of old to the Facebook Credits of today — just as the giants of the industrial revolution (eg, Boulton’s Factory) did 200 years ago. If you think that sounds fanciful, remember that the wholly virtual economy — that has no industrial analogue — is already of significant size and growing strongly.

more than 100,000 people in countries such as China and India earn a living by performing ‘micro-tasks’ in the virtual economy. Jobs include categorising products in online shops, moderating content posted to social media sites, or even playing online games on behalf of wealthier players who are too busy to tend to their characters themselves.
[From Finextra: Three billion dollar virtual economy to fuel developed world – World Bank]

As the World Bank report notes, this economy is already worth several billion dollars. With better money, it could be worth several billion more.

These opinions are my own (I think) and presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]