Snippings

I’ve been reading through the GBG/Forrester study (January 2018) “Leaders In Financial Services Are Experts In Customer Identity” when I noticed a very interesting contrast.

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The sharing economy is gargantuan. A recent research report published by Bank of America Merrill Lynch estimates the value of it is about $250bn (£190bn) and it’s growing rapidly.

From The sharing economy is failing for one simple reason – people can’t be trusted | The Independent

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Starting on Tuesday, Whole Foods shoppers who pay with the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa card will earn 5 percent back at the grocery chain’s U.S. stores.

From The Amazon Prime credit card will start giving 5 percent back on Whole Foods purchases – Recode

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FED up with missing sales in an increasingly cashless society, an enterprising… Big Issue seller Robin Fabian bought a contactless card reader to increase his sales So the 50-year-old bought a contactless card reader just before Christmas, which he said paid for itself on the first day. 

From Homeless Robin increased his sales thanks to contactless card reader | UK | News | Express.co.uk

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The program is not oriented around making money from interest payments, but to support merchants selling on Amazon’s marketplace and to boost Amazon’s overall sales growth

From Amazon and Bank of America partner for lending program but growth has stalled

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“Payment identity relates to the issue of the correct identification of payment counterparties. Personally, I think this is much more complicated than it sounds… This raises real issues to do with privacy and these need to be carefully thought through to avoid a Chernobyl of personal information downstream”

 

From “World class coffee morning with PaymentsUK | Consult Hyperion”.

 

 

 

 

I noticed that one of the comments on that thread contained the obvious and sensible suggestion that people be allowed to create payment identifiers that are unrelated to to other personally identifiable information.

Should work as a reverse phone book for email addresses, too. I asked my bank if i could just create my own PayID that isn’t a phone or email. No luck. I think the fast xfers still work with existing BSB/acct numbers so that’s what I’ll stick with.

— Russell Fitzpatrick (@4bx99)

February 17, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Indeed. Back in 2015 I said that “my personal preference would be to start work on looking at the idea of ‘payment names’ so that someone could send money to £dgwbirch”. It wasn’t a new idea even then. Back in 2012 I even explained how to fund the system: 

In the general case, payers should enter the payee’s “Pay Name” (e.g., £dgwbirch or £chyp.com or £donations@oxfam or whatever) rather than a mobile phone number. The Payments Council should sell vanity Pay Names to fund the development of the system and to keep it free to users. I’m sure some far eastern oligarch will cheerfully stump up a million or two to own £007 and I’m sure that even in these straightened time the forward-thinking finance director of Consult Hyperion could be persuaded to spend a few quid on £chyp.com and so on.

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The development of a digital identity strategy was a recommendation of the 2014 financial system inquiry, which found a “fragmented, unco-ordinated ecosystem of digital credentials creates high costs to government and taxpayers”. 

From Bank push for new digital identity regime | afr.com

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According to the indictment, the Russians not only created Paypal accounts, bank accounts, and false identity documents with stolen American identities

From Mueller Indictment: Russian Trolls Stole Real US Identities to Fool Facebook | WIRED

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“FINMA’s principles focus on the function and transferability of tokens In assessing ICOs, FINMA will focus on the economic function and purpose of the tokens (i.e. the blockchain-based units) issued by the ICO organiser. The key factors are the underlying purpose of the tokens and whether they are already tradeable or transferable. At present, there is no generally recognised terminology for the classification of tokens either in Switzerland or internationally. FINMA categorises tokens into three types, but hybrid forms are possible: Payment tokens are synonymous with cryptocurrencies and have no further functions or links to other development projects. Tokens may in some cases only develop the necessary functionality and become accepted as a means of payment over a period of time. Utility tokens are tokens which are intended to provide digital access to an application or service. Asset tokens represent assets such as participations in real physical underlyings, companies, or earnings streams, or an entitlement to dividends or interest payments. In terms of their economic function, the tokens are analogous to equities, bonds or derivatives.”

From “FINMA – FINMA publishes ICO guidelines”.

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We said at the end of last year that conversational commerce would be one of the key themes for 2018 and as the year unfolds this prediction is looking spot on. Customers like messaging, and if we (ie, the payments industry) can add payments to that channel then it stands poised to gain a significant fraction of the what now seems almost quaintly called the electronic commerce sector.

It looks as if “chat” is a good place for companies to start. Here’s an example. Israel Discount Bank rolled out the Personetics engine through a virtual assistant service “Didi” and has had 200,000+ customers use it. The top three learnings so far make for interesting reading.

1. Customers ask deeper questions of a virtual assistant than you’d think. ‘If a customer has a loan, he will go into specific questions about refinancing loans,’ Frishman said. ‘We covered loans [in Didi’s answer base], but we didn’t think they would go so deep.’ Discount is rolling out a new customer relationship management system, to which Didi is connected. So if Didi can’t answer a question, the customer will be forwarded to a human agent. The agent receives a record of the conversation with the bot. This lessens the chance that the customer will need to answer a question more than once. In a recent survey conducted by eGain, 59% of respondents (62% in the U.S. and 55% in the U.K.) found that having to repeat information and context to a human agent after handoffs from chatbots was the biggest hassle by far in using virtual assistants. This is a result of chatbot deployments that are disconnected from agent assistance.

2. Customers prefer texting over any other mode of communication.

3. Customers would rather ask for something than look for it. I can relate to this. If I can’t see what I want on the bank landing page, I’ll pick up the phone and go to the chatbot. Actually, last time I used this I got quite annoyed with it because it (I don’t know whether it was a person or not) wanted me to confirm my identity when the question that I wanted to ask had absolutely nothing to do with who I am.

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