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just checking my calendar to see if it is April 1st!

Whilst Starling has a lot going for it, they have, I fear, made one significant mistake. Unlike Revolut and Monzo, they use a questionable offshore company to process our card spending. This means Starling have to focus on front end gimmicks like orientation on the plastic instead of being able to guarantee that our personal data is not sitting resident in RAM in an offshore server waiting to be hacked.  This is the achilles heel.  

I like Starling Bank, but this simply smacks of desperation to be in the news. You turned your logo sideways on a piece of plastic and this is news? As an aside - I take my card from my wallet, landscape style, the mag stripe is landscape, sentences read better landscape, my tv looks better lansdscape. You had outages recently. I would like to know my money is safe. Less about the logo and more about the strength and security of the system please!

I love this... how can I find out more?

Hi, 

That is a good question. I suspect that right now it adds minor benefits:

1. Possibly faster payment through turnstyles and the likes

2. Benefit of not keying in pin - some time saving and no risk of pin theft.

3. feel good!! I love the feel of paying by phone.. there is still a novely to it.

In time (and its close) - there will be some much nicer benefits... by paying via phone the loyalty and rewards functionality can be much more sophisticated - you spend, rewards go to phone instantly, could potentially end up as extra funds on phone. Add geolocation services and it becomes slicker again - you are walking past Costa and phone pings you that you bought your last coffee there and Costa is offering you 50P off if you buy a coffee now and so on.... ignoring the intrusion questions (which ultimately will be controllable by the user), there are some clever things around the corner and Applepay is just pushing it all forward. By integrating with Banks this early they can suffer some early headache  - the benefits of having the banks on board is huge for them.

Shane. 

They are not bringing any thing new - tech wise. They are bringing the muscle in - the muscle to sway the card issuers (banks) into talking to their app. As I understand it - their app must (with mag emulation) provide a dynamic cvv for each transaction and this must be verified on the bank side.. .so they have to share keys (or make it more complex and operate token mechanics to achieve something similar).

I've had HCE working over Android for some time - when running in mag emulation mode I see the same sort of issues that are being reported currently by Applepay users. See www.axlpay.com for video of my spends. Where Apple has the power to sway banks - I don't have the same power. So  - any of you banks out there would would like to Pilot payments over Android with cloud served tokenisation - please do contact me. (skype: oharasha)

We are the pavement testing!!

In the majority of cases this is not an Applepay failure.. many shops just not handling contactless very well... and - I am presuming Applepay is currently mag emulation and not full chip emulation ==> I know some shops (rightly) reject this in preference of chip emulation over contactless. thoughts?

Interesting thoughts and clearly from a very knowledgeable perspective. Is plastic really going to be able to compete with mobile? With mobile loyalty, I can track spends, combine with HCE products, combine with p2p products, get alerted when I am close to shops with offers and so on. And for those people on low data bundles, will they still be on low data in 12 months... some yes, but many no, I would think. Its difficult to be black and white about it but it just feels like the time is right, or very close to right, for the big move to mobile. 

Agreed Marcus. Cloud contact with a device allows closer contact.. ie closer scrutiny by the issuing side and hence protection against fraud. With frequent token cycling and p2pe the bones of good longer term solutions are there. My biggest concern is that with the proliferation of solutions being put into play, whilst most will be robust, some will be, inevitably, weak and when exploited, public confidence will be rocked.