History of live five

Oh man! 2017!

This was the first public “live five” of technology-driven changes in the secure transactions field that we thought would have a real business impact over the previous year. We’d used the idea internally before, but in 2017 we made the predictions public in the spirit of openness and honesty that we are famed for, to see how the predictions held up.

1. RegTech. I think we did pretty well with this prediction. Interest in regtech has grown throughout the year and the ability of regtech to make real differences in major markets is established.
2. Digital Identity. As we noted, one of the key regtechs, if not the key regtech, is digital identity. It did shoot up the agenda over the year and some interesting initiatives opened up.
3. PSD2 (still). No commentary is needed!.
4. Paying on the Go. We thought that a key use of open APIs will be payments, and very likely mobile payments. MasterCard’s purchase of VocaLink would tend to support this view!
5. Invisible POS.  The shift from “check out to check in” paradigms is underway but it is fair to observe that we did not see the number of launches we were expecting as many of the projects remain in beta and will be holding to wait for the arrival of PSD2 (and CMA remedies in the UK).

Not bad. Actually a pretty good high level view of the kind of areas our clients began to prioritise five years go.

2018 not bad!

This was the “live five” for 2017. Let’s see how we did…

1. Open Banking. Well, it was hardly a tough call and we were bang on with this one. We were working on open banking projects in the UK, on the continent and beyond, so there was no need to guess at the importance.
2. Conversational Transactions. Yes, we were spot on with this one and not only in financial services. Many organisations began planning to move to messaging both for customer support and for transactions.
3. The Internet of Cars. This continues to develop, although the security concerns that we spoke about before continue to add friction to the development of new products and services in this space.
4. Artificial Intelligence. Again, this was an easy prediction because many of our clients were already active, although to be fair most of their spending was on machine learning rather than “true” AI.
5. Tokens/ICOs.  Well, we were right to highlight the importance of “tokens” (the basis of Initial Coin Offerings, or ICOs) and our prediction that once the craziness is out of the way, then regulated token markets will become significant looks to be borne out by mainstream commentary.

As we said back then, 2018 saw disruption because the shift to open banking, starting in the UK, meant the reshaping of financial services.

On a roll for 2019!

Last year we began organising our "live five" in a slightly different way, listing them by priority to our clients rather than as a simple list. So we put together the four key technologies that we thought would be hot last year together with a new technology that we were looking at out of the corner of our eyes. We went with…

1. The most important technology at the customer interface from the secure transactions perspective is going to be the technology of Secure Customer Authentication (SCA). We knew that better authentication technology would make life easier for clients in a number of ways, not only because of PSD2.

2. We thought more organisations around the world would look at the cross-sector digital identity initiatives and this is what happened in Canada and Australia for example.

3. From our work on ticketing around the world we saw a renewed focus on the deployment of real digital wallets  because transit (and other forms of ticketing, such as the sporting events) are what make consumers start using digital wallets, not payments.

4. We expected to see a growing use structured risk analysis for IoT. This has begun, but not to the extent that we though it would. The 

5. We thought it was time to start talking about post-quantum cryptography (PQC) in the mainstream and we were very right about this.

 

So a pretty accurate outline for the previous 12 months and in fact the renewed focus on identity, authentication and authorisation as the basis for transactions was emphasis early in the year when Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, spoke early in the year about the significant need for, and the high priority of, digital identity infrastructure for the financial sector.