Why should payments dis-empower consumers and providers?
I looked at your writing here
http://oakhallventures.com/mobile-money/
What is screaming loud is the absence of digital cash.
We are - as society - making a fundamental failure here as we are creating infrastructure that inherently, without choice, lead to
a) some commercial player in infrastructure intermediating or at least becomming intravenous part in all society value transactions.
b) all citizens and companies are dis-empowered.
c) it enables crime as it makes it easy to target citzens, systems, accounts etc.
E.g. the combination of UK/US-style creditworthiness ratings and Credit Cards is by far the biggest enabler of criminal fraud and identity theft in the world. NFC is even worse.
Why? Who say that digital payment should or must distort markets and create crime? Digital Payments are CREATING problems this way.
This create market disruption shifting power from the start and end of value chains to brokers and intermediates. Which is clearly against any sustainable understanding of Single Market.
What I miss is one-time-only transaction-isolated payments where the value is bound in some one-time-show key that can only be transferred once but do not require linking to an account or identity.
This would go far in eliminating problems to e-commerce enabling end-to-end commercial relationships.
Where is the government obligation to ensure sound market frameworks?
Group audience:
Comments
Yup. Digital cash a whole
Yup. Digital cash a whole other topic. But this is not really a suitable focus for our forum here.
Dave Birch who is on one of our payments panels has written extensively about it here http://www.chyp.com/ and you can also read more in David Wolman's "The End of Money".
Digital Cash is not just
Digital Cash is not just digital payments. We are in the field of blinded cryptography, ie. no trace back to the bacnk account even by serviceproviders all combined.
Presently only BitCoin is somewhat there, but its lack institutional currency backing and has a range of security problems makes it little usefull.
Digital Cash should be a key point in the Forum.
Without Digital Cash you cannot empower the Consumer - without empowered consumers, SME cannot protect themselves from the infrastructure intermediators and profilers.
Bad payments make bad business.