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.
We are all still processing the data coming in from India’s radical experiment with cash, and I still think that is way too soon to pass any judgement at all on whether the experiment has been worthwhile or successful, but it is interesting to see some of the immediate effects of the government’s policy of […]
Well, that was fun. The nice people at the Meaning Conference gave me 13 minutes to try to explain what a blockchain technology is, what blockchains might do, and what the implications might be, to an audience of largely creative people. Quite a challenge. Since they were creative types, I thought I ought to frame […]
A few years ago, I wrote that when it came to the regulation of payments, America could do worse than adopt something along European lines. By “European lines”, I meant that a regulatory framework which separated systemically risky operations such as lending people money from systemically unrisky operations such as low-value payments would benefit all concerned. […]
The discussions around digital currency continue. I had an interesting sort-of-argument with someone about this recently, and I mentioned in passing the dynamics of the shift from specie to token money during the industrial revolution. I think it’s worth expanding on this here, as to my mind it informs the debates about central bank digital […]
In payments, as in so many other fields, Kazakhstan is a beacon to the nations. I notice, for example. that they have recently launched a new tap and pay service that uses host card emulation, or HCE as it is known to us afficionados. Customers of Kazkommertsbank (KKB) in Kazakhstan can now make host card […]
It’s really hard to be James Bond these days. Apart from health & safety restrictions on the use of poisoned umbrellas and the legal restrictions on the murder of henchmen (even foreign ones), and all the paperwork around the expenses and what is VATable and what isn’t, you’ll be rumbled in an instant by your […]
It’s Vegas, so time for a glass of champagne. Luckily, they had some in the green room for the W3C panel on “One-Click Buying: New W3C Standards for Web Payments” so I poured myself a large one and went on stage to toast the guys while they discussed the working draft of the W3C Payments Request […]
I was relaxing watching the marvellous BBC programme “Rip Off Britain” the other day. It was a live episode [online here] featuring the noted and venerable British television celebrity Gloria Hunniford. The subject of the programme was bank security and it featured Gloria herself investigating how she was ripped off by bank fraudsters. Basically, a […]
Look, I don’t mean to imply that everyone who wants to keep cash, and in particular high-value banknotes, in circulation is doing so only to help to minimise the costs of criminal enterprise and to facilitate money laundering on a grand scale. That would be ridiculous, On the other hand, though, there does seem to […]
Now we all know what the bitcoin blockchain is, don’t we? It’s just one particular version of the general class of blockchains, which share the characteristics that data is stored in blocks and because of some cryptographic jiggery-pokery the blocks are chained together, so that you can’t go back and change the contents of a […]
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