Join the Community

23,479
Expert opinions
41,848
Total members
350
New members (last 30 days)
190
New opinions (last 30 days)
29,133
Total comments

Innovation in Financial Services

A discussion of trends in innovation management within financial institutions, and the key processes, technology and cultural shifts driving innovation.

Pat Carroll

Pat Carroll Founder/Executive Chairman at ValidSoft

What can Project Oscar learn from Bradley Wiggins?

Project Oscar, the mobile wallet grouping between Vodafone, O2 and Everything Everywhere, has had the go ahead from the European Commission to develop a single mobile wallet platform hosting cards, coupons and transactional information on the SIM card. If you think about it, the race for dominance in mobile wallets is rather like the Tour de Fran...

/security /payments

Retired Member

Retired Member 

'NFC? No F... Clue!'

We ran two rather unusual focus groups this weekend, discussing mobile payments. The first group was represented by "blue color" mainstream and "circumstantial" techno-ignorant late adopters - unbankable, migrants, no (higher) education and low-waged social groups. The second group was represented by the "Home alone"/P...

/payments

Retired Member

Retired Member 

Three 'contactless' myths

Myth One: Is it really contactless? Contactless payments are marketed by MasterCard as "Tap and go". If you tap, that's a contact... To differentiate itself, I guess, Visa is using "Wave" instead of "tap". Have you ever seen anyone waiving their contactless card (or a phone) when paying? Technically, if you were to w...

/payments

Retired Member

Retired Member 

Are you game enough?

I was at a Mobile event recently when the topic of gamification in banking came up. It’s a term that has come to polarise so many opinions. I happened to be on the panel when a member of the audience asked for our thoughts. One of the panel ‘experts’ proceeded to talk and they had absolutely no idea… He touched on using his Xbox to bank and he ...

/retail

Retired Member

Retired Member 

Swiss Banking Industry - where is the Swatch Bank?

The story is so well known that many details are now forgotten. For example that it was not Mr. Hayek who invented the idea of the Swatch but that he took it over two years after the launching. Or that Swatch, originally doesn't stand for "Swiss Watch" but for "Second Watch" Swatch began development in the early 1980s, under th...

/wholesale

Retired Member

Retired Member 

Barclays PingIt: UX SUX

If I give you £10 pounds, how difficult will it be for you to use it? Silly question. If I send you £10 via PingIt, would it be even simpler to use, considering how "revolutionary and easy" Barclays promises that service to be? Not quite. When I make a payment to someone who is not currently registered with PingIt, that person must sign u...

/payments

Retired Member

Retired Member 

Google Wallet: behind the scenes

Google Wallet's business model "bleeds" less than I originally estimated. Google's card issuing partner is not Citi, but Bancorp (thank you for the correction, Frank). The latter is exempt from the interchange fee cap, hence Google would receive around $0.80-1.20 for every $100 spent on its card, depending on whether it was an online or ...

/payments

Pat Carroll

Pat Carroll Founder/Executive Chairman at ValidSoft

The cost of e-crime: a wake-up call for the retail industry?

The recent findings of the British Retail Consortium’s first e-crime study which estimates that UK retailers lost over £205 million in 2011-2012 due to e-crime caught my eye recently – particularly the estimate that £77.3 million came from actual fraud losses. The most costly form of e-crime for retailers was personal identification-related fraud,...

/security /retail

Retired Member

Retired Member 

Google Wallet is losing money on EVERY transaction

At launch, Google Wallet (GW) was based on Trusted Service Manager (TSM) business model, similar to the one still favoured by the mobile network operators (MNOs), e.g. ISIS. Under that scenario, GW offered access to its embedded Secure Element for storing card details and authentication credentials. Unlike MNOs, GW was not greedy and offered reaso...

/payments

Retired Member

Retired Member 

Google takes its wallet to the cloud

Google is trying to inject new life into its mobile wallet platform by launching a cloud-based version of the app that can be linked to Visa, American Express and Discover cards. Will it be enough? When it was launched in 2011, Google Wallet was presented as the ultimate service that would take the NFC mobile payments revolution by surprise but ...

/payments /retail

Now Hiring