[ Dave Birch ] So far as the commonly-discussed “next billion” consumers are concerned, the idea of some kind of universal payment card is vanishing. We’ve spent the last 50 years trying to make Visa, MasterCard, Amex and others into globally-accepted brands and I, like many other consumers, get off the plane anywhere on Earth and expect my UK-issued Visa debit, MasterCard credit and Amex credit cards to work without let or hinderance... 

[ Dave Birch ] Over at the GSMA’s Mobile Money Exchange they’ve created a wiki for mobile money in an attempt to facilitate communication by pulling together a common set of definitions for the space, which is a laudable goal. If you’re interested in the topic, it’s definitely worth popping in and adding to the sum total of human knowledge. I’m sure that won’t mind a little vigorous debate either! If their efforts... 

[ Dave Birch ] I’ve been involved in a few discussions about prepaid cards over the last couple of weeks. One of those discussions was about whether some prepaid products would remain viable under stricter regulatory conditions. Why would regulators want to increase the regulatory burden, and therefore cost, of products aimed at the unbanked? Well, in the US, prepaid cards are the focus on attention because of their supposed criminal use.... 

[ Dave Birch ] I happened to be at a seminar about online payments for gaming and gambling and sat in on a fascinating talk by Jim Noakes, the Head of Payments at Gala Coral Remote Gambling , on the challenges that he is facing at the moment. It was fascinating because his list of challenges could easily serve at the basis of a requirement specification for a next-generation payment system. Setting aside the challenges of compliance, I thought... 

[ Dave Birch ] A correspondent writes to point me to the new report from Federal Reserve Bank of Boston called ” Who Gains and Who Loses from Credit Card Payments? Theory and Calibrations “, hoping to infuriate me by quoting from the abstract, which says On average, each cash-­‐‑using household pays $151 to card-­‐‑using households and each card-­‐‑using household receives $1,482 from cash users every year. Because credit... 

[ Dave Birch ] There’s a wonderful variety of new payment systems out there, one of the reasons why I love this business so much. A good example is FaceCash : the payment is made using a 2D barcode on a mobile screen (yet another case of innovators not waiting for operators to get their NFC act together) and the POS displays the picture of the payer so that the merchant can authenticate them. And it’s cheap. That was enough…  Read More →

[ Dave Birch ] Michael Joseph will soon be retiring from the position of CEO of Safaricom Limited after a decade leading the joint venture between Vodafone and Telkom Kenya. Since the re-launch of Safaricom in October 2000 he has guided the company from a subscriber base of fewer than 20,000 to more than ten million and has presided over the launch of many innovative products and services such as M-PESA, the subject of this podcast. Michael has... 

[ Dave Birch ] I was in another conversation about mobile payments yesterday — pitching for work with a company that is looking to extend their payment services through the use of mobile phones — and shortly afterwards I got a note from a journalist asking me why there was so much attention on the topic. In both cases, my focus was not on using mobile phones as card substitutes but as using them as both card and POS substitutes. In... 

[ Dave Birch ] Feza Tarhan is the Business Development, Rules and Regulations Director of the Turkish Interbank Card Center (BKM), which aims to improve the card payment system infrastructure for the benefit of all Turkish banks. She has built and led Interbank Card Center’s Trusted Service Manager role in the NFC Ecosystem in the past two years. She works proactively with card payment system players, and consistently looks for opportunities... 

[ Dave Birch ] Well, I’ve been using my contactless products for a while now. In practice, most of my transactions have been using my splendid Barclays OnePulse Visa PayWave product (I don’t understand why you don’t see more of these in London, since they include Oyster functionality and will auto-topup your Oyster stored-value from your Barclaycard) and my…  Read More →

[ Dave Birch ] I happened to be looking through some old notes about mobile payments recently looking for some information about one or two ancient, sales, mobile payment systems. I came across an article called ” Why banks and telecoms must merge to surge ” from the Booz Allen Hamilton strategy+business magazine that I’d filed away back in 2001. It was a very good article, which is presumably why I’d snipped it and scribbled... 

[ Dave Birch ] I opened my first bank account, with Bank X, when I went to university. I walked in to my local branch on the second or third day after arriving in Southampton and opened an account. When I started work, I transferred that account to Cobham in Surrey, near where I was working. A couple of decades ago, that branch was closed and the accounts transferred to Walton-on-Thames, which is where my relationship banker was based when they... 

[ Dave Birch ] Brett King, Author of BANK 2.0 , is also the founder of the International Academy of Financial Managemen t, one of the fastest growing professional associations and training institutes in the world. A regular speaker at the top global conferences for financial services, King is an acknowledged expert on wealth management, customer experience and retail channel distribution strategy. He publishes regularly in his role as industry... 

[ Dave Birch ] Is it immoral to pay someone in cash? At Mobile Money Services in Africa in Johannesburg, Brian Richardson from Wizzit said that he refuses to pay anyone in cash, from employees to domestic staff. This reminded me of a conversation at a bank a few weeks ago. I was talking about Faster Payment Service (FPS) and I mentioned that I’d found it an excellent service for paying builders who were working on my house. On of the other... 

[ Dave Birch ] I was leafing through the English newspapers on the plane the other day — the usual kinds of thing, you know, men out on charity walk attacked and hospitalised by drunken yobs, public worker gets £80,000 payoff because new chairs cause backache, 18,000 Facebook tributes to murdering nutter and so on — but it was the story of the thieving Air France stewardess that caught my eye…  Read More →