A library of snippets
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“Due to the new ‘dynamic linking’ requirements for remote electronic payments, online retailers will no longer be able to charge an estimated amount to a customer’s card where the final amount is yet to be confirmed. Instead, the retailer will need to look at alternative mechanisms, such as obtaining authorisation for a maximum amount, but charging the final amount when it is known.”
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One of the European Central Bank (ECB) board members, Yves Mersch, recently said that “for merchants, instant payments at the POI (point of interaction) could be a cost-efficient alternative to cards”. This is hardly a new idea (I’ve written about it frequently) and I think that there is a general feeling in the cards business that credit transfers could take a third or so of the card volume in a post-PSD2 Europe. There are really three reasons for this:
First of all,
Secondly,
Finally I think that the reason why credit transfer will be big is that it won’t be only banks and merchants instructing these transfers. As I wrote for Wired magazine back in 2017, it will be the internet giants. As I said then, “Facebook will ask for (and get) direct access to your bank account and the payments infrastructure. Next time you need to send your friend a tenner, you’ll instant-message them the money, rather than opening up your boring bank app, fiddling about finding their bank details, authenticating yourself again and finally firing off the cash”.
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“This essay argues that ‘data ownership’ is a flawed, counterproductive way of thinking about data. It not only does not fix existing problems; it creates new ones. Instead, we need a framework that gives people rights to stipulate how their data is used without requiring them to take ownership of it themselves.”
From “It’s time for a Bill of Data Rights – MIT Technology Review”.
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A young relative of mine was coerced into spending this last week end at an English holiday camp resort. When she got there she was shocked to discover that, for whatever reason, they were cash only for the weekend! All over the complex were “cash only” signs! Remember, these signs are completely unfamiliar to anyone under the age of 30, especially from the South East of the country where Transport for London triggered the contactless revolution, because this a debit card generation in a country where more than half of card transactions are already contactless. Signs like this one would be invisible to her!
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So here’s a normal young person, all of her money is in the bank and she never goes to ATMs, so imagine her further horror of having to use an ATM on site to get cash which then charged her £1.50 to get her own money. Even more punishing was the fact she had to go back to the ATM again for more cash so yet another £1.50 charge!!!
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The question she asked over and over again during her stay was why in this day and age would such a large complex be cash only? Doesn’t anyone there have an iZettle or a PayPal account? That doesn’t seem like much of an investment when surely with so much cash around it could mean some staff creaming it off? A temptation surely. In this situation cash is expensive for the individual but it is also expensive for the organisation as a whole! Especially when you remember that cash has a lot of other hidden costs: armoured cars taking money to banks, the extra hour for workers to reconcile the till, robberies.
There’s no excuse for making people use cash in 2019.
While I was thinking about this, I happened on an article in The New Yorker that really made me think about the importance of virtual identities, the practical impact of personae. The article concerned X Anderson, the Chair of the University of Michigan’s department of philosophy and a “champion of the view that equality and freedom are mutually dependent”. Her thinking encapsulates and enlightens some of my long-held view on the need for transactional interaction via multiple virtual identities. She says that “people now have the freedom to have crosscutting identities in different domains”. What she refers to her as domains are the different contexts in which transactions occur. As she goes on to day, “At church, I’m one thing. At work, I’m something else. I’m something else at home, or with my friends”.
The ability to manage these separate identities and partition their use across domains is, she argues, utterly vital. The ability “to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains” she says, “is what it is to be free”.
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“At fifty-nine, Anderson is the chair of the University of Michigan’s department of philosophy and a champion of the view that equality and freedom are mutually dependent,”
From “The Philosopher Redefining Equality | The New Yorker”.
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“‘People now have the freedom to have crosscutting identities in different domains. At church, I’m one thing. At work, I’m something else. I’m something else at home, or with my friends. The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains?’ She paused. ‘That is what it is to be free.’”
From “The Philosopher Redefining Equality | The New Yorker”.
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“The circumvention of trust is a great promise, but it’s just not true.”
From “There’s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology | WIRED”.
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“I think it’s useful to distinguish two kinds of crypto-asset. Let us call these ‘imitative’ and ‘entitative’ respectively. An entitative crypto-asset (ECA) is an asset that only exists on a blockchain e.g. ‘bitcoins’ themselves (UTXO), or cryptokitties. An imitative crypto-asset (ICA) is an asset that exists on a blockchain, but which is intended to represent an asset that has an existence outside of the Blockchain e.g. a tokenised ‘e-key’ that controls a car.”
From “Bitcoin and the Promise of Independent Property Rights — a reply”.
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“The proposal is for a central bank to divide the monetary base into two separate local currencies—cash and electronic money (e-money). E-money would be issued only electronically and would pay the policy rate of interest, and cash would have an exchange rate—the conversion rate—against e-money.”
From “Cashing In: How to Make Negative Interest Rates Work – IMF Blog”.
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When I was in New York a couple of weeks ago I had to visit a couple of different buildings for various meetings. At the first building, I was asked for identification. As I am English and not North Korean, I don’t carry identification papers with me when I walk down the street and my British passport and British driving licence (neither of which the security guard could have verified even I had shown them to him) were locked up securely back in the hotel safe, so I presented my standard US identification document. This an old building pass from the previous Consult Hyperion office in midtown. It expired a couple of years ago, but it has my picture on it and it says David Birch it was accepted without question and I was allowed in.
When I went into second building, I was asked to scan my driver’s license! They had a scanner on the counter to read the barcode on the back of US driver’s licenses. Obviously I don’t have a US driver’s license, so I showed them my expired building pass again, I was given entry to the building.
If I did have the US driver’s license, then there’s no way I would have let them scan it.
Apart from the obvious fact that my ability to drive is unrelated to whether I have been invited to a meeting or not, nothing that is on my driving licence (except perhaps my name, which had already told the guy on the desk) is any of their business and by handing over my personal information to yet another random database held by yet another random company, I was vastly increasing the chance of my licence data and my personal details being being stolen.
Snippings