BETTER-MOBILE-BANKING

I’m trying to get work in the Strategic Consulting field (wish me luck), so I’m putting the blog on hiatus. Feel free to email me in the interim…

Oh and thanks for dropping by…

Labels: offtopic

m-commerce proposition was more pie in the sky than fridge on the train

Interesting take on the reality of the mobile payments arena versus the marketing hyperbole: m-commerce proposition was more pie in the sky than fridge on the train.

Labels: Dave Birch

Hi everybody.
This will be my last post for 2007. I’m off on my first holiday in three years and celebrating completion of my MBA with Honours.
I’d like to wish all my readers a happy and safe holiday period

Labels: offtopic

Admittedly a little unrelated to Mobile Payments and Banking, this story from the Wall Street Journal discusses a topic most people who play ice hockey eventually discuss: what if your goalie literally filled the net?

Saul Hansell over a the NY Times writes how Bill Me Later has been accepted by Amazon. Apparently it took seven years and a chunk of equity to get them to adopt the payment system. Bill Me Later only exists because of the automated systems for approving credit and the distrust or unwillingness to use credit cards over the net. What I particularly like about Bill Me Later is the cheaper fees (1.5% vs 2%) than credit cards charge and the great fit it has for micro transactions.

Labels: amazon, BillMeLater

Now this is good. Boils down to this: Deloitte says that mobile payment etc can’t really piggy back on existing bank based payment systems because the margins in the payment game are too slim. And where would the extra payment come from for the payment provider? The banks? The customer? I agree with Dave that participants in an industry are unlikely to originate or back the innovators that bring the industry to its knees, because the “out of the box” thinking that the innovators express cannot originate from within the industry.
Labels: Dave Birch, deloitte, innovation

According to The NZ Herald, PayPal is announcing a deal with asterCard where they offer a one off MasterCard number for use on websites tat accept MasterCard but don’t accept PayPal. Clever for PayPal, as its another way of insinuating itself into ecommerce, even when its not actually explicitly accepted.
Labels: mastercard, paypal

Facebook is cool. Google wants it, Microsoft got a piece of it and Open Social have allowed other Social Networking sites to effectively use Facebook applications. But as Charis points out, all this information about people that is collected in one place and is publically available leads to the risk of fraud

Labels: Digital Identity, facebook, fraud, social networking

Dave Birch from Digital Money Forums

PayPal has pottering along nicely. The steady growth of their off-eBay business means that they are sitting side-by-side with traditional online acceptance brands (Visa, MC, Amex, Discover, et. al.). Competitively, payments companies and their issuers have looked at this as an online phenomenon. Rightly so, as it has been. Online transaction volume is just north of 10 per cent. One of PayPal’s new products is their virtual debit card, a response to customer requests that PayPal be accepted at more online merchants. If you want to buy something at a merchant that accepts cards but not PayPal, PayPal will generate a one-off MasterCard number for you. Now in testing, the virtual card is expected to be rolled out in the Unites States by Christmas. They are also steadily putting together other services that may pose a genuine threat to incumbents, according to Aite Group payments analyst Adil Moussa: deferred-payments options and mobile payments. But why? Surely a bank can work out how to offer a good mobile payments service can’t it (or, more likely, wait until someone else has worked out how to do it and then buy it, rather as RBS did with WorldPay and Bibit). Why is it considered a threat to banks? Similarly, the deferred-payment option is already provided by banks in some countries, and if customers show that they want deferred-payment options that it doesn’t seem wholly implausible that MBNA or HSBC could provide them. In this particular case it’s not actually PayPal that provides the underlying instrument, it’s GE Money that is delivering the credit behind the deferred payment and since (as a general rule) providing credit is the most profitable part of the payment process for banks, that is why banks might be eyeing PayPal more nervously than before.

I wonder if the next cycle of nervousness might involve other more novel underlying instruments? We’ve noted before the kerfuffle about virtual currencies in China, for example. These are now far from niche. The “QQ currency” is substantial: while it was created for use on the web, it is being used in other kinds of commerce (which, since I think that stimulating trade is one of the good things that a payment system should do, is probably a good thing overall). The Chinese government had a bit of a crackdown on QQ coins with the predictable (to economists) result: the price of the money went up (in fact it went up by 70% against the Yuan) which clearly indicates that there is a significant unfulfilled consumer demand for the new currency.

Now, QQ may not mean much to consumers in the U.K., but just suppose that eBay or Tesco or Google were to create their own currency for special purposes and then it were to be adopted more widely? I think this might be rather fun. And rather likely, since the marginal cost of the “n+1″th currency in the electronic world is very low. Just because this was tried before and didn’t work — Beenz, Flooz and others — doesn’t mean that what Javelin call the finite-to-universal currency phenomenon couldn’t happen in the future especially given the brand and presence of the big web players. Why would they do this? Well, a few years ago, I contributed to an excellent book by Forum friend David Boyle: The Moneychangers. One of the other chapters is by noted lateral thinker Edward de Bono. It’s called “The IBM Dollar” and is based on a 1994 pamphlet he wrote for the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (CSFI) — in fact it was the first CFSI pamphlet I read — and sets out some reasons as to why a company might want to issue its own money. Well worth a read: in fact, I’m going to read it again myself.

Labels: Dave Birch, EBay, mastercard, paypal

Morgan Stanley has a report on Internet/Technology Trends that proves interesting. Obvious trends include:

• “Rest of World” PC Sales increasing faster than the traditional heavyweights.
• BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) gain ground in TMT (Technology, Media and Telecommunications).
• Asia/Pacific Internet Users growing faster than other markets

Labels: internet, morgan stanley, technology