forum - Consult Hyperion

The BBC World Service has a podcast series called “50 things that made the modern economy” hosted by the economist Tim Harford. It features inventions ranging from COBOL and banks to antibiotics and, interestingly, M-PESA. This caught my attention because M-PESA is one of the Consult Hyperion projects from the last couple of decades that we might find ourselves chatting about at the forthcoming 20th annual Forum, Tomorrow’s Transactions 2017. The Forum will be held at the America Square conference centre in London on 26th/27th April and Kevin Amateshe, the current M-PESA product manager will be coming in from Nairobi to give us a detailed picture of where M-PESA is now and where it will be going next.

The Forum, thanks to the wonderful support from our friends at Vocalink, PaySafeGroup, WorldPay and Olswang, will once again provide a unique environment for learning, investigation, discussion and debate about the future of electronic transactions. The future of people, businesses and government in the post-industrial online and interconnected economy.

This year’s invited keynote will be given by Professor Lisa Servon, one of the world’s leading authorities on financial and social inclusion. All delegates will receive a copy of Lisa’s new book “The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives”.

Other speakers and panelists include Gilad Rosner (IoT Privacy Forum), Nick Telford-Reed (WorldPay), Amy Parsons (Discover), Sandra Alzetta (Visa), Terry Cordeiro (Lloyds Bank), Jane Zavalishina (Yandex Data Factory), Tim Jones (Mondex co-founder), Will Judge (MasterCard), Katie Evans (Money and Mental Health), Vasily Suvorov (Luxoft), David Rennie (gov.verify), Emma Lindley (Innovate Identity), Andy Tobin (Evernym), Ben Whittaker (Masabi) and other people who are shaping the future of retail electronic transactions right now will be discussing PSD2, shared ledgers, AI, real-time payments, the Internet of Things, financial inclusion, open-loop migration and everything else shaping strategy across a variety of industries.

In addition to a fireside chat about instant payments with David Yates (CEO, VocaLink) and Ron Kalifa (Vice Chairman, WorldPay), there will be an introductory keynote from me, the judging of the annual Future of Money Design Award for artists and at the end of the first day a 20th anniversary drinks and networking reception. You’d be mad to miss it. As always, the Forum is limited to 100 people to ensure every gets a chance to meet and interact with everyone else so run, don’t walk, to our web site and buy a place right now. I look forward to seeing you all there.

Incidentally, listening to the BBC podcast narrating the story of our good friends Nick Hughes and Susie Lonie (Susie will be at the Forum too if you’d like to come along and say hi to her) brought back many memories, so I decided to conduct a little bit of post-industrial archaeology and I tracked down the presentations on M-PESA that Nick Hughes and our very own Paul Makin (who led the original feasibility study for M-PESA!) ave at the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (CSFI) in November 2005 when M-PESA had 300 users and eight agents!!! As of today, it has 25 million users and 261,000 agents across 11 countries.

You can read them here….

Nick Hughes [csfi_Nov_05_Hughes.pdf]Paul Makin [csfi_Nov_05_Makin.pdf]

See you all in April when we get together and try to work out what the next M-PESA will be!