I’m at the Kings Fund conference centre this morning listening to some incisive speakers ay the Intellect/Payments Council joint conference – Driving Change in Payments 2011 and will, over the course of the day, be reporting some of the highlights, in almost real time.

The conference is the first of its kind – in that it is not looking at what shiny new payments mechanisms are coming to market. Instead is more focused upon getting all concerned parties – from technology vendors, banks, mobile operators, consumers, retailers, charities and many more – in the same room at the same time and learning more about what the current obstacles to the uptake of new, technology-enabled payments mechanisms are. How you pay for ‘stuff’ affects everyone. Therefore everyone has a stake and has concerns, objectives and an idea of what the future of payments looks like. During the duration of this conference, we’ll hear from many of these stakeholders and by the end of the day, hopefully, we’ll have the starting point for a new period of ‘concerted collaboration’.

Watch this space over the course of the day.

The Hargreaves Report, published this week, has gone some way to protecting what is the lifeblood of the technology industry. Yet we have to wonder, has it actually gone far enough? This review, after all, was undertaken because the UK was so far behind the curve in its approach to providing an appropriate legal framework for innovative technology start-ups to flourish. The Hargreaves report was nicknamed the ‘Google review’ after said internet behemoth famously said that they would have been unable to establish themselves in the UK because of our outdated copyright laws.

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Time is ticking on towards the Intellect/Payments Council ‘Driving change in payments’ Conference 2011 and in the midst of our preparations it occurred to me… building an accepted, trusted payments system is much like baking a cake, or at least what I imagine baking a cake is like, I’m no whizz in the kitchen.

I’m told that every cake needs a decent base (is this flour?), and in the case of a payments cake, the base is innovation. It’s eye opening, just how much innovation there actually is in the payments ecosystem at the moment. Name me a retailer… there’s a very good chance that they have run a contactless payment trial at some point in the last couple of years. Since December 2010, a small number of black cabs have been fitted with contactless payments technology, making payment more convenient for customers. Look ahead to 2012 and we’re expecting TfL to be accepting contactless payments cards as part of their Oyster system and later this summer we’re expecting one of the leading mobile operators to launch what is arguably the first mobile wallet in the UK.

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Technorati Tags: conference, Innovation, payments, payments council, payments systems

The BBC is reporting various shockingly poor statistics on voter turnout at last night’s local and AV elections on its live feed, including 20% in Manchester; 37% in Cardiff South and Penarth; and 40% in Peckham. On top of that, there have been reports of AV turnout in London being as low as 10%. Granted, these are not official sources but it does beg the question, if turnout is a low as this at what is quite a critical point in the political calendar one year into the lifetime of a coalition government that has roused much public ire, is this a low point for political participation in the UK?

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I recently blogged about the technology implications of a structural separation of UK banks from the point of view of the technology industry, the long and short of which was that it wasn’t going to be pretty.

Since this point the much anticipated interim report has been published and the Independent Commission on Banking has proposed a less dramatic ‘firewall’ (as labelled by the media), that would protect the retail banking functions of the UK’s universal banks from the potentially hazardous activities of these banks’ investment and wholesale activities.

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Technorati Tags: banking, Banking Commission, fintech, interim report, ring fenced

The update that the Independent Commission on Banking publishes on Monday will, of course, have an impact upon the future of the UK’s banking system – after all, that’s its remit. Of course I’m making a fairly sizeable presumption that the government will implement the Commission’s final recommendations in September.

One of the potential reforms that we may see the Commission leaning towards on Monday, is the structural separation of banks into retail and investment arms, or at the very least ring-fencing off different business lines into separate subsidiaries. As you will no doubt be aware, the perceived logic is that if the investment arm of a bank makes some dodgy decisions that puts its continued existence in jeopardy (including that of its retail banking arm – which allows individuals, businesses and the economy in general to go about its everyday business) it should be allowed to fail without dragging down the economically critical retail banking and payments infrastructure elements within it as well.

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Dear Jim,

Please can you fix it for me to have a growth strategy that recognises the importance of the role of technology in the UK’s economic growth? Whilst the chancellor of the exchequer has announced some supportive and welcome measures in his budget on Wednesday, I can’t help but feel it’s missed a bit of a trick here.

I’ve taken some time to think about it and now the dust has settled on what was, to be fair, a budget that was always going to be constrained in what it could deliver. However it is hard to see how emphasis can be put on ‘putting fuel into the tank of the British economy’ without attaching equal importance to the actual ‘engine’. As you well know Jim, this particular engine is the technology industry and the role it plays in underpinning every aspect of our economy, from advanced manufacturing to life sciences, creative industries to business services is all-encompassing.

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The fact is that the UK currently lags behind many other countries, both developed and less developed, in the integration of technology into its payments systems. A constant stream of news from the US about the burgeoning success of innovative companies offering new payments systems – most notably contactless – is hard to ignore. It’s also hard not to compare it to the current state of our payments systems in the UK. As someone who did the majority of his Christmas shopping through various commercial smart phone apps, I yearn for the time when I can pay for my breakfast with my smart phone and pay for the hire of cricket pitches through a [unnamed and shamed] London borough council with something other than a post dated cheque or postal order.

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With news that the Liberal Democrats are feeling the pinch and are moving out of their historic offices in Cowley Street and looking for somewhere, well, more economically frugal, maybe it’s time for the ‘party political’ to take a leaf out of the private sector’s book and work from home a bit more.

A ludicrous suggestion I hear you say? Well, maybe. How, after all, is one meant to keep tabs on one’s own [sometimes ‘independent’] MPs, party members (there are some left you know), run fundraising events and ensure the party’s image is maintained against the backdrop of the Coalition Government?

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The Financial Times recently ran with a very enlightening piece (‘Elusive Information’) stating that there is currently no means in place for regulators to identify the build up of major risk across the financial system and so step in to mitigate the threat of another collapse of the banking system. Crucially, there are also no notable plans to implement such a system, and an assumption that the means to mitigate another crisis is already in place. This is not the case and there is a strong arguement for the Treasury Select Committee to integrate this into its ongoing scrutiny of the government’s plans to reform the financial system.

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