Snippings

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A taxpayer who bought and handed over £15,000 in Apple iTunes gift card vouchers is one of “hundreds” of HMRC customers to be defrauded in the past month, a scam bulletin says.

From Fraudsters posing as HMRC hijack iTunes :: Contractor UK

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CVS Pharmacy today announced the company will launch digital receipts as a new option for all members of its ExtraCare Rewards program. The new option for digital receipts will roll out in early June and eventually be available in 7,900 retail locations. Customers will have the opportunity to opt-out of receiving paper receipts for all in-store purchases when completing their transactions in the front of the store. Once the one-time process is completed, customers will receive receipts digitally, along with their coupons and rewards, each time they shop at CVS Pharmacy.

From CVS Pharmacy Says “So Long, Long Receipts,” Announces Arrival of Digital Receipts for Customers | CVS Health

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I ignore almost all of the “news” that arrives via my cryptocurrency feeds, but a particular story about Bitcoin in the mass market caught my attention because it appeared to herald an unexpected and significant shift in the mass-market. The announcement was that Starbucks is “working with Microsoft and a leading global exchange on a new digital platform that will allow consumers to use bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies at Starbucks”. This struck me as a little odd, since Howard Schultz, (the executive chairman of Starbucks) said earlier this year that “I don’t believe that bitcoin is going to be a currency today or in the future”. When I read the story in detail in turned out to be untrue, just as I has suspected, and a couple of days later came the further annoucement that “Starbucks has clarified that it will not be accepting Bitcoin (BTC) or other cryptocurrencies as payment”.

Starbucks has no intention of accepting Bitcoin at retail point of sales (and nor, I imagine, does any other Main Street retailer). Starbucks said that they will play a “pivotal role” is developing applications “for consumers to convert their digital assets into US dollars”. Note the specifics: to convert cryptocurrencies into US dollars. What was actually being announced was, essentially, a plan to find a way of loading Starbucks wallets from Bitcoin accounts. Which brings us on to the bigger strategic point.

Now, earlier in the year Jeremy Light, who knows what he is talking about, made the evolution of retailer wallets central to his predictions for change in the payment sector this year. He said that these wallets – for both online and in-store purchases, where I expect to see convergence – will spread “emulating the success of Starbucks and Walmart” by focusing on slick checkout. These retailer wallets are of great strategic importance. It is reasonable to observe that the way most Americans are currently experiencing the new payment revolution “isn’t through Apple or Android Pay, but through proprietary payment apps from chains such as Target, Walmart, and Starbucks”.

In strategic terms, my strawman assumption is that retailers are going to get rid of payments at POS and shift to payments inside their own apps, apps that they use to deliver better customer services. Or, in the bumper-sticker version, “we’re going from check-out to check-in”. Take a look at what the major supermarket chains have been doing in the UK, where Tesco was “the latest grocer to develop its own technology to bypass the costly Android and Apple systems” and Sainsbury’s is trialling its SmartShop app which allows users to create their own shopping lists, navigate stores and make payments at dedicated kiosks. Just as in the US, where Walmart has launched its own system to expand customer payment options and increase the speed of checkouts in its stores, we will see more of these. I already have half a dozen on my phone.

A Comscore survey a couple of years ago found that 55% of American consumers would be happy to have four or more retailer apps on their phone. Now, I don’t remember the figures exactly, and a quick search on my laptop can’t find them, but I remember something I looked at for a UK client a couple of years ago where it turned out that something like 90% of household disposable income in the UK goes to five retailers per household. In my house, for example, a Waitrose app, a BP app, a Martins’ the newsagent app, a Boots app and a Tesco Metro app would pretty much take care of things.

In the in-app vision of the future, consumers wouldn’t have hundreds of apps for every retailer. For the retailers they visit frequently (e.g., Starbucks) they will have the retailer app and use it. In other cases they will just use their bank app or some third-party payment app (e.g., Venmo). Actually, Venmo is a good example, since they have already made it plain that they see in-app payments are the future, saying that they had kill off their developer API to move the resources to their in-app payment service.

This focus on app-and-pay is hardly new and was an obvious strategic focus long before Tim Cook stood up on stage to explains “the benefits of Apple Pay in apps” so I’m hardly reading the tea leaves by saying that tap and paying with mobile phones may not, in the great scheme of things, be that important because, to Jeremy’s point, online and offline will converge to app-and-pay not tap-and-pay.

This may well turn out to be good news for the trading and use of cryptoassets. There is no point trying to extend acceptance of such assets at point-of-sale. That’s not what they were designed for and it makes no sense from a strategic perspective for retailers to mess around with in-store systems, service and acceptance for them. However, having online mechanisms to load the retailer wallets by exchanging these assets for retailer currency is a different proposition, because the point-of-sale systems only need to be modified once (to accept the wallet) and the any number of back-end conversions can be explored without requiring further front-end modifications. In time, the POS will then vanish (except for those retailers who still want to take cash) and the triumph of “invisible payments” will be complete.

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Public transport companies in the Netherlands are planning to abolish cash payment for bus and tram tickets, following a significant rise in robberies. By 2018 it will only be possible to pay for travel using the national OV Chipkaart contactless smartcard, a smartphone, or a contactless bank card.

From Dutch to abolish cash payments for public transport | International Railway Journal

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Eliminating cash payments will require significant investment – each tram and bus will need to be equipped with a payment terminal at an estimated cost of €1500 per vehicle.

From Dutch to abolish cash payments for public transport | International Railway Journal

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the government said authorities know of no money laundering cases in which the huge bill was a relevant factor

From Cash Is King: Swiss Defend Huge 1,000-Franc Bank Note – ABC News

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Will instant payments exacerbate existing societal problems? Will they place already vulnerable people in harm’s way? And if so, whose problem is this to address: the bank, the regulator, the operator of a scheme? Or perhaps the onus falls squarely on the consumer alone?

From Should Faster Payments Be, Well, Slower? | Bank Think

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This puts the FCA in a difficult position as it wants Britain to be “a hostile sector for money launderers” but also to ensure “the unintended consequences of anti-money laundering (AML) regulation are minimised.”

From Banks dump small businesses, charities and fintech firms to save on red tape costs

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Paying by phone was commonplace [in Stockholm], and I didn’t even get a weird look when I scanned a QR code at a grocery store checkout and wordlessly strolled away with my basket of smoked meats.

From What The Mark Of The Beast Taught Me About The Future Of Money – BuzzFeed News

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A political battle between the UN-recognised Tripoli government led by Fayez Sarraj and the Tobruk-based parliament loyal to General Khalifa Haftar in the east has led to parallel splits in the country’s financial institutions, with two central banks threatening to circulate rival Libyan dinar banknotes in the country.

From Battle of the banknotes as rival currencies are set to be issued in Libya | World news | The Guardian

Apparently there’s going to be one lot of good old British-sourced banknotes and another lot of dastardly Russian-sourced banknotes duking it out across the desert. Fascinatingly, while I was reading this piece, Benjamin Cohen’s “Currency Power” was on my bedside table!

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Releasing software as an API allows those companies to pursue a number of different adoption routes. Rather than trying to sell specific industry verticals or use cases, often the customer is a developer, leading to an extremely low-friction sales process.

From The rise of APIs | TechCrunch

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