Skip to main content

BBC - Future - The surprising place where cash is going extinct

We’ve been in mobile payments from the earliest days. We worked on the UK’s first prepaid scheme, first WAP “walled garden”, first NFC trials and, I’m proud to say, M-PESA in Kenya. Success has many fathers, of course, but carrying out the original feasibility study for M-PESA is one of the bigger feathers in the CHYP cap. We also work for customers all around the world (I mean it: in the last year we have consultants working in China, India, the Americas, Australia, the Far East. Leeds, even. We have a pretty realistic picture of what is happening at the forefront of the payments industry. Hence it was no surprise to us to read that:

Payments through mobile she says have rocketed from 5% two years ago to more than 40% now.

From BBC - Future - The surprising place where cash is going extinct

Yes, the BBC points to Somaliland rather than powered-by-Swish Sweden as the place where cash will first vanish into memory. And if your memory is good, you may recall that you read it all here first, five years ago.

Somaliland might well become the world’s first cashless country. Not Iceland or the Netherlands, Korea or Kenya, but Somaliland

From The world’s first cashless country | Consult Hyperion

As I have often said at conferences, in seminars and when interviewed, it is the mobile phone (not the payment card) that is the nail in cash’s coffin, because a mobile phone is a means to get paid as well as a means to pay. It’s both a “card” and "a terminal" in the world of Visa and PayPal, Faster Payments and Venmo.

If you go to China or Kenya, you’ll see people paying with phones. In fact when I was in China last month, I was in a near-permanent state of shock watching people for everything, everywhere with ubiquitous bar codes. And almost all of those payments went through third-party providers (WeChat and AliPay) rather than through bank services.

So why don’t we pay for everything using our mobile phones in the UK? Or USA? 

New interfaces (voice), new security (face), new authentication techniques (continuous passive authentication)

It’s more security, but more convenience that wins out.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

There is no excuse for not taking cards

So we went to the pub. For lunch. Seven of us. Say £20 per head. £100+ quid. Say £50 quid gross for the pub. Colleague goes to order food and drinks and pay at the bar. Apologetic barmaid comes over to explain that their “card machine” is down, so she can only accept cash. Under normal circumstances I would have simply walked out, feeling it wholly inappropriate to reward such a poorly managed establishment and, as a functioning actor in a capitalist economy, done my duty to depress their lunchtime takings. Here’s what we wanted to say: This is absurd. This is 2016 not 1916. Your card machine is down? Well, so what! Are you seriously telling me that mein host has no mobile phone number capable of registering for PingIt or PayM? That none of the staff or the pub itself have a PayPal account that I can send the money to? That neither the owners nor managers not contingency planners thought to tuck an iZettle behind the bar to use when the clunky and expensive GPRS terminal fails for o...

Financial Cryptography: Corda Day - a new force

Forum friend Ian Grigg, who I always take very seriously indeed on any such topic, wrote about Corda on his blog and concluded with a powerful statement. Bitcoin told the users it wanted an unstoppable currency - sure, works for a small group but not for the mass market. Ethereum told their users they need an unstoppable machine - which worked how spectacularly with the DAO? Not. What. We. Wanted. Corda is the only game in town because it's the only one that asked the users. It's that simple. From Financial Cryptography: Corda Day - a new force xxx It seems to me, however, what Ian is pointing to as the greatest strength of their approach is also the greatest weakness. A staple feature of unimaginative management consultants presentations about innovation is some variation on the statement by Henry Ford that if you had asked users what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses coupled with some variation on the statement by Steve jobs that it was pointless ask...

We could fix mobile security, you know. We don't, but we could

Earlier in the week I blogged about mobile banking security , and I said that in design terms it is best to assume that the internet is in the hands of your enemies. In case you think I was exaggerating… The thieves also provided “free” wireless connections in public places to secretly mine users’ personal information. From Gone in minutes: Chinese cybertheft gangs mine smartphones for bank card data | South China Morning Post Personally, I always use an SSL VPN when connected by wifi (even at home!) but I doubt that most people would ever go to this trouble or take the time to configure a VPN and such like. Anyway, the point is that the internet isn’t secure. And actually SMS isn’t much better, which is why it shouldn’t really be used for securing anything as important as home banking. The report also described how gangs stole mobile security codes – which banks automatically send to card holders’ registered mobile phones to verify online transactions – by using either a Trojan...