Category: Uncategorized

[Dave Birch] The new V.I.P. (Virgin Important Person) had ads with the tag line “It’s not the size of your V.I.P.-ness, it’s how you use it”. It has a great gimmick: it uses the Visible Results GraphiCard(TM). Customers join the scheme in-store and receive their card on the spot. Points earned on every transaction at Virgin Megastores are instantly displayed on the face of the card, along with their new points balance and the points required to reach the next reward level. (Why you can’t just print these on the receipt, as Aneace has often suggested, I’m not sure.) Rewards include special discounts and entertainment incentives – such as backstage passes, concert tickets, and instant prizes, the usual kind of loyalty stuff.

Technorati Tags: credit cards, debit cards, loyalty, retail

Continue reading “Points mean prizes (again)”

[Dave Birch] Will Judge of TfL and I were in a discussion on the cashless society — sparked off by the announcement about Barclaycard and Oyster getting together — on BBC Radio 5 yesterday on the Worricker on Sunday programme (hit the “listen again” button from the Radio 5 home page if you don’t have enough to do — the discussion runs from about 50 minutes in to an hour in).

Technorati Tags: cash, predictions

Continue reading “DJ Dave and MC Will”

[Dave Birch] The agreement between Transport for London and Barclaycard made the news. Barclays customers will soon (ie, mid-2007) be able to use their cards in the normal chip and PIN manner; as an Oyster card by placing the card on TfL readers; or to make contactless payments at retailers around London. For purchases of less than £10, consumers will complete the transaction by just placing the card against the reader, while for more expensive items users will have to verify the deal by entering their PIN as usual. Sounds fun — I’ll apply for one.

Technorati Tags: contactless, credit cards, debit cards, travel

Continue reading “Clever contactless chip cards”

[Dave Birch] The award-winning BankID initiative in Norway is a very useful case study.  It shows what can be done to implement digital identity services when there is a working partnership between people who have an application that needs digital identity services (ie, banks) and people who have the technology platform to deliver them (ie, mobile operators).  Is this a special case?  One might argue that Norway is a small market, a homogenous society, a place where the co-operation between banks and the operators is unusually close.  Norwegians would co-operate in this way, others wouldn’t.

Technorati Tags: authentication, banking, identity, mobile, security

Continue reading “Norwegians would”

[Dave Birch] Brian Chambers from Octopus Knowledge gave an update on the scheme at the Mobile Payment Strategies conference in Munich today and I thought an overview would be useful for digital moneyers. The key points are 14m cards issued, 50K POS terminals, 7m cards active, 400+ merchants of whom 60 are transport operators, 10m transactions per day (daily value €6m), some transactions are more than HK$100 (approximately US$15), the maximum balance allowed is HK$1,000 but the average balance is HK$10, the MSC fee is 1%, 20% of cards are autoloaded and 50% are loaded at retail points of sale, float income is used to reduce operational costs, about two-thirds of the transactions come from the transport operators who are the shareholders and a quarter of the transactions are non-transport (parking is counted as transport). The back office handles 8,000 enquiries per month, most of them enquiries about services and perhaps only one or two complaints per day (usually about not getting discounts because the transport operator has pressed a wrong button somewhere). The scheme now has loyalty points, “Octopus Rewards”: the majority of cards are anonymous so the loyalty programme is to encourage people to register so that Octopus can deliver better CRM and targetted marketing for clients. About 1.1m people have registered so far.

Technorati Tags: contactless, e-purse, mobile, nfc, travel

Continue reading “Octopus observations”

[Dave Birch] The Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress recently issued a statement saying that they have no plans to tax transactions taking place inside virtual worlds. That’s nice of them, obviously. I should have mentioned this sound policy to someone in high office when I was at the Treasury yesterday. Nevertheless, it strikes me that the fact that they are even issuing such a statement reinforces the suspicion amongst digital moneyers that something really interesting is going on here, even if the up-to-the minute Financial Action Task Force (FATF) report on new payment technologies doesn’t mention it. But if I get a tax bill from the IRS after selling my hand-crafted magic axe to a cash-rich time poor Swiss dude, just because the transaction happened to occur on a server in the U.S., then there’ll have to be another tea party. Or is that no taxation without representation stuff all history now?

Technorati Tags: games, law

Continue reading “Are they for real?”

[Dave Birch] At the Intellect Identity Management Group meeting today (Chatham House rules), there was a presentation on the current situation with regard to identity cards in the UK followed by a discussion with industry representatives.  One part of that discussion was about the potential for "radical redesign" of the UK’s proposed national ID card scheme.  I think what is meant by this is an attempt to cobble together something from existing databases (eg, national insurance) that can be called a new scheme but would save lots of money.  But what should the goals of a redesign be? A potential list was put forward, including helping to prevent identity theft and helping to get e-government off the ground and it got me thinking that surely what the government wants is for UK residents to actually want an ID card rather than have to bully them into getting one.  But what kind of things could it do?  Most of the interactions with central government are infrequent (eg, filling in your taxes) and most of the interactions with local government (eg, booking at the leisure centre) don’t need high security, so an ID card wouldn’t make much of a difference to any of these "use cases".  But if an ID card is viewed as a digital identity, then the question becomes one of binding it to higher value virtual identities that need protecting: your Second Life identity, your chat room identity, your iTunes identity maybe.  How can an ID card support those identities?  If it’s not mandatory, then no-one will want unless it supports them in useful ways.

Technorati Tags: business, ID cards

Continue reading “How to make an ID card useful”

[Dave Birch] Even in the Magic Kingdom. This sort of thing would never happen in an advanced nation, where consumers can use their mobile phones if they want to pay for something. So is Japan a special case, or a window to the wireless world. More evidence for the latter is accumulating. (Incidentally, I’m reliably assured that yesterday’s press release from NTT DoCoMo says that their DCMX “credit card” now has more than 1 million users only six months after launch).

Technorati Tags: cash, security

Continue reading “Cash, parking and videotape”

[Dave Birch] The poor old greenback (ie, the Federal Reserve note, or FRN, not the scaled sardine of the same name) is under assault from all sides. We’ve noted before the unusual fact about U.S. currency that most of it isn’t in the U.S. In fact about $450 billion of the $760 billion in circulation as of December 2005 is held abroad. And the Federal Reserve report on the use and counterfeiting of United States Currency Abroad says that about 1 in 10,000 of the FRNs in circulation is counterfeit, the same as in the U.S. So the FRN seems to work pretty well, but there are some people around who want to change it.

Technorati Tags: cash, costs, security

Continue reading “US Currency notes”

[Dave Birch] I love this kind of serendipity.  I was wandering down the road to meet William Heath of Idealgovernment for a coffee when I happened to glance down a passageway in Old Gloucester Road opposite the October gallery.  I was utterly surprised to see a piece of ironwork from 1925 advertising "British Monomarks".  I was even more surprised to see an office marked British Monomarks behind it: it turns out they still exist.

Technorati Tags: history, ID cards

Continue reading “Monomania”