Community

This is one of those payment innovations where the customer "just get's it" - no complicated user journey, and a real benefit in terms of speed at the checkout. Most trendy bars now prefer contactless to cash.

Sceptics still claim that TFL drove usage, but the sudden rise in acceptance is more likely due to the eventual roll out of new POS terminals as the merchants restrictive rental agreements on the old ones expired, and the card renewal lifecyce eventually putting a contactless card in most customers hands.

Mobile and especially high-value contactless still has a way to go before it reaches mass adoption – some people still look mystified, but with acceptance points growing, it should soon become a sizable minority.

Very please to have CashFlows on-board as a founder Issuer.

Congratulations Suresh and the team.

Well done Dean,

Looks like you are building the de-facto standards for request-to-pay!

The scale economies of TSB and RBS, have not been serving their customers at all well recently. 

What the consumer needs is new competition between challenger banks and established banks to get the established banks to raise their game rather than just acquire the challengers to kill the threat.

Hi James,

Thanks for your kind comments.

Pure biometric payments at POS still look inceadibly had to do in a universal Open Loop style, in the way that cards currently work.

I can see this working in a closed or restricted loop environment, but there is no universal standard and not enough data pointns to provide both the identification and authentication needed for payment.

In the short term I see the alterative for customer present as Token + Biomentric (like Chip and PIN). For eCommerce this is easluily achieved with a smartphone as the token, but we need a standardised universal approach to enable this to scale for customer present transacitions.     

In the short term Zwipe looks to offer a great soltion, once the economics of scale kick in. 

In Europe, I don’t see the demise of Chip and PIN for face to face retail transactions any time soon. Contatless and High-Value contactless such as ApplePay and AndroidPay will continue to grow, but they are effectively working as proxy cards in an EMV acceptance network.

Requiring a customer to interact with a working, charged and connected smartphone (with actual coverage or logged into a stores wifi) at a point of sale introduces way to much friction into the buying process, and risks the prospect of introducing cart abandonment into physical stores.

An off-line (from a customer perspective) capable solution is the only practical alternative to carrying cash.

I see the biggest growth area for the biometric approach you describe as ecommerce / CNP transactions where there still is no simple and universal solution that is both secure and convenient. The device connectivity requirements are also overcome as the customer is probably already shopping on their mobile!

This is a well researched article and while there may be disagreements about the eventual outcome, it does raise some important principals about the impact of the reduction on the wider community.

A few years ago there was talk of ending cheque payments, which was eventually shelved due to an orgainised campaign by some of the largest users and bebeficiaries of cheque payments

At the moment there is no obvious organised group representing the cash users in our society to mount an effective campaign against such changes.

Interesting risk assessment - but surey they should be treating thus as quasi cash, in the same way as buying foreign currency and making a good return from the 3% cash advance fee they charge on their credit cards.

I was originally sceptical about this card, but I can now see the benefits.

The card supports high-value contactless transactions, with the same convenience of Android/Apple pay, but without a battery to keep charged, and at fraction of the cost.

It also provides a very convenient biometric authentication when used with existing POS devices with no added friction from an additional device, and even less friction than entering a PIN.

I can see that once manufacturing scales up and the cost comes down to a small multiple of standard EMV&PIN cards then there will be a much higher take up amongst issuers.

Issuing the card will pose some interesting challenges for the newer banks that have no physical branches.