Mobile

In case you didn’t see it, Wired magazine ran an article about Jack Dorsey and Square this month.  Throughout the article, they compare Jack Dorsey to Steve Jobs and Square with Apple. In a long opening – the first page is just about pouring tea! – they finally get to the crunch so here’s my shorter,…

I had an interesting dialogue over lunch yesterday. One of my colleagues had just got his iZettle dongle. iZettle is a Square for Europe, offering Chip & Signature payments on smartphones (Square reads the mag stripe). It was originally going to be Chip & PIN, but the PIN terminal detail is too costly to rollout…

Everyone’s now talking about mobile payments and mobile banking.  I was talking about that effectively as a core strategic area back in 2004.  So it took about five years to become the mainstream bank conversation. Now, I talk about social payments and social banking.  I’ve been talking about this as a core strategic area since…

There’s a strong dialogue about why new services such as PayPal and Square take off so fast, and the answer is a combination of usability and accessibility. If something is easy and it works, then it can gain critical mass fast. That’s true of Facebook, Twitter and other social media. The more intuitive, accessible, easy…

We talk a lot about the threat of mobile carriers and telecom firms moving into banking and eating our lunch.  We cite examples such as NTT DoCoMo buying a credit card firm or Safaricom becoming the biggest financial transactor in Kenya, and what that will mean to banking in the future.  We see O2 and…

I feel like I spend a lot of time these days dissing contactless payments, or at least those that rely on NFC and RFID chip technologies. The reason being that I cannot see why I would want to get something out of my pocket to touch on a terminal – these are actually contact payments,…

I feel like I spend a lot of time these days dissing contactless payments, or at least those that rely on NFC and RFID chip technologies. The reason being that I cannot see why I would want to get something out of my pocket to touch on a terminal – these are actually contact payments,…

The wireless world of connectivity we live in has risks, and the greatest risk has to be infection of technology. Technology viruses like trojans and man-in-the-middle look mild today, when you see the tsunami of malware that’s out there. Just a year ago, I was saying that banks should offer advice to consumer about security and…