[Dave Birch] One of my most frequent criticisms of the UK's national identity card scheme is that it is backward-looking, an electronic simulation of a Victorian ID card rather than an ID card for the 21st century. I gave an example of this in a talk recently by using the case of OpenID, noting that...

[Dave Birch] Just as mobile proximity payments start to slide into the trough of despair, their inevitable trajectory before they climb slowly to the plateau of productivity, the tension at the heart of the current non-market is again under discussion. For carriers, the benefits of offering mobile b...

[Dave Birch] I've always been interested in the potential for micropayments and the idea of a metaphorical "red button" on a keyboard that means "pay the owner of the web page I'm looking at 10 pence" or something similar. There are many times when I've come across an interesting or useful blog post...

[Dave Birch] Do you need a bank to be 'banked'? There was a splendid seminar on this topic at Chatham House. After an introductory address from some guy from the government who had to return to the Commons for important business and so wasn't able to stay for questions, there was a terrific panel di...

[Dave Birch] A couple of days ago and I again mentioned the government's "break the glass" plan for a national identity scheme. In other words, what is the emergency plan to be followed should the integrity of the system itself fail. The point about the "break the glass" plan is a serious one. While...

[Dave Birch] I spent the day at the seminar on the business use of ID cards at the EEMA/Digital Identity Forum seminar sponsored by Consult Hyperion at the British Computer Society. The presentations are available from the EEMA web site so there's no need to go through all of them here, but I just w...

[Dave Birch] I haven't had time to read the Carter report on Digital Britain yet, but I will try and catch up with it sometime soon. I've had a quick look at a few bullet points and not seen anything particularly interesting. There's been plenty of comment from sources that I pay attention too, thou...

[Dave Birch] I've been spending a lot of time on biometrics recently, trying to work out the best way for our customers to exploit some advances in the technology. In particular, especially given the ICO's recent "Privacy by Design" report, I've been trying to think of ways to make biometric authent...

[Dave Birch] One impact of the credit crunch, or whatever you want to call it, is that consumers are shifting their spending from credit cards to debit cards. Or, more accurately, consumers are shifting their spending from credit cards to debit cards even more quickly than they were before. This is ...

[Dave Birch] So who, exactly, is going to pay for innovation in the payments field? Should individual stakeholders incrementally innovate or shoudl we make co-ordinated attempt to improve the payment system and share the cost? Should we regulate and let the market sort things out or should we try to...