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It’s really hard to be James Bond these days. Apart from health & safety restrictions on the use of poison umbrellas and the legal restrictions of the murder of foreign-looking goons, and all the paperwork around the expenses, you’ll be rumbled in an instant by your Facebook account. Because you don’t have one. It is not simply a question of keeping details offline, either, but the opposite: individuals or identities without deep, broad online presences are precisely those likely to raise suspicion. “The challenge of having a credible digital footprint is significant,” Mr Inkster said. Fake Twitter or Facebook accounts alone do not make the grade. From The spy who liked me: Britain’s changing secret service - FT.com If I come across someone in a work context, and they are not on LinkedIn, then I assume that they are either in the witness protection programme or have been in prison. And of course if you are not yourself on Facebook, then it’s only a matter of time before some s

xxx According to [Claus Richter from Nordea], while it is impossible to know exactly what a successful revenue model will look like in an Open Banking world, there are number of possibilities ranging from existing transaction fee-based models to licensing deals with fintech firms. From VocaLink Connect - Review from SIBOS - Day 1 xxx

xxx “There’s a convergence going on,” said Mr. Birch, who currently works for Consult Hyperion. “In the future you will have one experience — it won’t matter if you are at the store or on the phone. It will pop up on your phone, you will put your thumb on it and you will be done.” From What if ‘One Click’ Buying Were Internetwide? - NYTimes.com Currently? What does Nathaniel Popper know that I don’t? Anyway, 

xxx Miller is one of nearly 10,000 living Americans who are erroneously reported dead to the Social Security Administration (SSA) each year. In most cases, the citizens' names, birth dates and Social Security numbers are mistakenly entered into SSA's master death file, a computer database used by government agencies, financial institutions, medical researchers and genealogists. From 'I'm not dead,' Central Florida man says xxx

The wonderful people at WorldPay had a hackathon, and Consult Hyperion (along with the Visa Collab and MongoDB) were one of the sponsors of the event, so I got to be a judge too. It was, I have to say, great fun. You can see some of photos from the event here . There were 140+ “hackers” supported by mentors from WorldPay and the sponsor. The mentors helped the hackers to understand and use the WorldPAy IoT API so that they could get going on their ideas. I went along to help to get things going along with my Consult Hyperion colleagues Matt and Stefan. We’d had brought along a 3D printer for the hackers to use, so Matt gave a Friday night tutorial on how to create digital 3D objects and get them turned into actual physical objects. Pretty cool. The hackers had more tutorials on Saturday  then they had the rest of Saturday and Sunday morning to develop their ideas. I cam back on the Sunday to join with the rest of the judging team. Here I am with Nick from WorldPay getting s

xxx we won't even feel like we're transacting anymore From Neha Narula: The future of money | TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript | TED.com xxx

xxx We're about to enter a new phase of money. The future of money is programmable. From Neha Narula: The future of money | TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript | TED.com xxx

For anyone interested in the evolution of electronic money and the intersection between digital financial services and the real world, Kenneth Odero has written a superb study of the failure of the Kenya’s attempt at cashless public transport. I won’t quote the key points - I urge you to read the whole - but I will draw your attention to his key conclusion. In this context, it is therefore not surprising that the uptake of electronic ticketing has failed to take off. Despite the convenience it brings to the commuters, the system has a critical design flaw - it could not work considering the power structures that exist around the public transport system. From Kenya's Cashless Payment System For Public Transport Was Doomed By A Series Of Experience Design Failures Money is not a neutral actor. Replacing dumb money with smart money changes power structures.

xxx In an report this week, researchers at Kaspersky Lab said they discovered at least 12 underground sellers offering skimming devices capable of stealing fingerprints from ATMs enabled with fingerprint scanners.   From Biometric Skimmers Pose Emerging Threat To ATMs xxx

xxx According to the latest PYMNTS.com Global Cash Index, cash is the most widely accepted method of payment in the biggest Western European economies, where €2.1 trillion of cash transactions were completed last year. From 5 reasons why cash doesn’t go out of fashion | Banking.com Well, it might be the most widely accepted but it’s no longer the most widely used. xxx According to the new research, consumer card payments will surpass cash payments for the first time in 2016, registering USD $23.1 trillion globally. From  Consumer Card Transactions Overtake Cash Payments for the First Time in 2016 | Business Wire xxx

xxx But now Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, has suggested that the 1,200-year-old British penny could be scrapped. From  After 1,200 years, could it really be time for the penny to be dropped? Actually, I’ve suggested it more than once but just because he’s the Governor of the Bank of England his plagiarised proposal gets all the attention. xxx Some 126 million coins have been taken out of circulation since a scheme was introduced to round shoppers' bills up or down. From 126 million coins taken out of circulation since rounding scheme introduced - BelfastTelegraph.co.uk Ireland can do it, why can’t we?

xxx Nearly a third (31%) of those who were defrauded reported falling victim to a hack which occurred when making a payment online. O ne in 10 (10%) had their card duplicated at an ATM and a small proportion (8%) said they had been hacked when making a contactless payment. From 4.5m debit or credit cards cancelled after fraud, study shows | Daily Mail Online xxx

Now we all know what the bitcoin blockchain is, don’t we? It’s a particular kind of shared ledger that uses a particular kind of communications protocol to obtain a particular kind of consensus about a particular kind of content. Right? And it’s just one particular version of the general class of blockchains, which share the characteristics that data is stored in blocks and because of some cryptographic jiggery-pokery the blocks are chained together, so that you can’t go back and change the contents of a block without having to then change the contents of every subsequent block. And depending on the consensus protocol that is used, you can’t change the blocks without everyone else agreeing to let you do it. Whereas auditing at present entails the confirmation of transactions and balances on a company’s accounting ledger at the end of the period, a transaction on the blockchain would provide a permanent and immutable record of the transaction almost immediately. From  Blockchain and

xxx Police arrested Dmitry Zakharchenko, the deputy head of the Energy Industry Department of the General Administration of Economic Security and Combating the Corruption (GAESCC), after the operation. According to investigators, police seized a sum of some $120 million and € 2 million ($2.2 million). From Money bag: Police raid on anti-corruption official uncovers over $120mn in cash — RT News xxx

xxx t is likely that Kenyans will continue their preference for mobile money over debit cards over the next several years. Lafferty forecasts that, by 2018, the annual value of mobile payments will reach $57.7 billion, while total debit card billed volume will amount to $14.6 billion. By the end of 2015, there were an estimated 27 million mobile money customers in Kenya – in context, the adult population is 25.5 million. The annual value of mobile payments reached $27 billion in 2015 – equivalent to 45.7 percent of Kenya’s GDP – with an average of 41 transactions per customer per annum and an average transaction value of $24. From xxx

xxx Paydiant, a subsidiary of PayPal, is launching a QR-based system that allows users to withdraw contactless cash from ATMs. The scheme will roll-out to more than 70,000 ATMs across the US, with customers being able to order cash through a mobile wallet app and then generate a QR code to use at the ATM. From PayPal enables contactless withdrawal at 70k US ATMs - IBS Intelligence xxx

xxx Bruce was changing his business point of sale system. The system suppliers told him Eftpos would be free, the direct debit card – which he says few people use – would also be free, but payWave would be about 1.35 per cent and credit transactions cards even more expensive. From SunLive - You wave and we all pay - The Bay's News First I’m off down to New Zealand shortly because the nice people at PaymentsNZ have invited to me to deliver a keynote at their 2016 conference.

xxx Bank reserves can't be used for settlement on a permissioned blockchain: they can only be used for settlement via a central bank RTGS system. In contrast, our Utilities Settlement coins – we assume – would be used for settlement on a permissioned blockchain collectively owned and managed by the consortium…. why would this arrangement be of interest to a bunch of banks? What advantages would it give them over existing central bank RTGS systems? From 'Settlement Coin' is All About Banks, Not Blockchain - CoinDesk xxx

xxx Beyond lessening the regulatory requirements and thus lowering the barriers to entry, two of the main advantages of a regulatory sandbox are the transparency of the licensing / application process, as well as the support regulators can provide to FinTechs to guide them through the process, speeding up the product development cycle and launch. From The Regulatory Sandbox | Ariadne Plaitakis | Pulse | LinkedIn xxx

xxx Patients who use fake medical notes to take extra time off work could be struck off by their GP. Websites are offering bespoke notes purporting to be from a customer’s family doctor – for as little as £10. From GPs could blacklist patients who use a forged doctor's note to pull a sickie | Daily Mail Online xxx

snippet The team built credit card prototypes that can communicate directly with each other by reflecting Bluetooth signals coming from a smartphone. This opens up possibilities for smart credit cards that can communicate directly with other cards and enable applications where users can split the bill by just tapping their credit cards together. [From Interscatter communication enables first-ever implanted devices, smart contact lenses, credit cards that ‘talk’ Wi-Fi | UW Today ] snippet

snippet Amsterdam Falafelshop owner Matt D’Alessio said he stopped taking cash in December when he realized more than 85 percent of his customers — a mix of tourists and Boston University students — paid with plastic and that he could save employee time and payroll costs by eliminating cash registers and trips to the bank. [From No cash allowed: Stores refusing to accept money- Boston Globe ] snippet

snippet Currently, approximately 400–500 of the company’s vending machines include cashless payment readers, which has resulted in about 32 percent of Coastal Canteen’s average machine sales coming from cashless usage. [From Cashless Payments Strengthen Consumer Choice | PYMNTS.com ] snippet

snippet Large banks’ trading income in Jan-Jun was 37% lower than in 2015, confirming the diminished role it is playing since the financial crisis (it contributes only a tenth to total revenues any more). The emerging single largest problem, however, is fees and commissions. They dropped by a full 10% yoy to the lowest H1 level since 2009. This is confounding banks, which had pinned great hope on them to make up for shrinking interest income. [From Talking point ] snippet

snippet Andrew Goodwill, founder of the Goodwill group, which fights fraud, said: “The ombudsman’s ruling, while it will not set a formal precedent, suggests there was a flaw in the due diligence that Lloyds should have carried out when the fraudsters’ account was opened.” [From Hope for bank fraud victims: 'We were robbed of £47,000 – but the ombudsman took our side' ] snippet

xxx Ninety percent of the rise in online fraud in the last year can be explained by EMV alone From Report: Online Fraud Attack Rate Increases 137% YoY - Sept. 1, 2016 CardNotPresent.com xxx