David Birch
Dave is Director of Consult Hyperion, the secure electronic transactions consultancy and is an internationally-recognised thought leader in digital identity and digital money. Named in Wired magazine’s global top 15 favourite sources of business information; rated one of the NextBank “Fintech Titans”; voted one of the European “Power 50” people in digital financial services and ranked Europe’s most influential commentator on emerging payments.
The Chinese were first with the great transition from commodity money to paper money. They had the necessary technologies (you can’t have paper money without paper and you can’t do it at scale without printing) and, more importantly, they had the bureaucracy. “In 1260, Genghis’ grandson Kublai Khan became Emperor and determined that it was […]
Payments used to be a banking business. Now it is not, and the interests of the banks and the payments industry are no longer wholly coincident. The banks don’t own Visa and MasterCard any more, kids using Venmo neither know nor care whether it is a bank or not and there are plenty of non-bank […]
Wow. One of my very favourite companies has always been Worldpay. They have a very special place in my heart because many years ago, when they were first starting out, I was sent up to Cambridge by a client to go and meet them and assess what they were doing. As a junior deputy assistant under-consultant, […]
Another waste of money is around the corner for the UK banking sector. “Almost 1 million UK bank customers will be forced to have to use new six-digit sort codes… The change has been caused by the Vickers rules, which force banks to ringfence their high street operations from other banking activities.” Almost 1m UK […]
A decade ago I remember writing that one of the problems with QR codes is that there is no security. Some years later I wrote an article pointing out that NFC ought to be safer than QR codes because NFC included a standard for digitally-signing tags (although I did also note that no-one used it) […]
A payment scheme isn’t just a data switch that connects consumers, banks, merchants and retailers. If it was, there wouldn’t be any, because we’d all just use the internet instead. There are rules that need to be in place to make a scheme work in the mass market, to protect the participants and to fairly […]
You can’t say that London isn’t a fintech powerhouse and epicentre of the revolution that is forging a new financial services industry in the white heat of old technology. Wait, what? “The UK is to roll out an image-based cheque clearing system in October that will slash processing times from six ‘weekdays’ to one day” […]
As I was in Canada, I thought I might mention that a detailed investigation into the cost of payments at POS just released by the Bank of Canada shows (absolutely as I would have predicted given the scale and dynamics of the Canadian market) that Debit cards are the least costly in terms of total […]
Well, this is interesting. On the very day of Consult Hyperion’s 20th (yes, 20th) annual Tomorrow’s Transactions Forum to discuss the future of secure electronic transactions and much besides what should fall through the internet tubes but the fifth annual “ING International Survey Mobile Banking 2017 – Cashless Society“, which surveyed nearly 15,000 people across […]
There’s a lot of consumer frustration over mobile contactless payments, but that may not matter if apps, not contactless, are the future of mobile payments. How are mobile payments getting on in the UK? According to the most recent figures from Transport for London, mobile phones now account for about 8% of their contactless transactions, […]
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