The death benefit disks are seemingly one of the the most valuable forms of currency. Exchangeable for either 200 D’s in cash or 250 D’s in food coupons. You can then buy some tasty Soylent Crumbs for just 2 D’s a bag. Although the rich bodyguards seem to be buying jars of strawberries for 150 D’s a pop. Some people are just made of money…some food is just made of…
I am not sure of the name of the currency other than just D’s. If anyone can enlighten me that would be lovely.
Artificial intelligence (2001)
‘Question me you pay the fee, two for five you get one free.’
Two questions for Dr. Know cost 5 new bucks with a third on the house. Ten new bucks and a ten copper = seven questions for David as he tries to find out who the Blue Fairy is.
Another cab fare. This time it is Biff Tannen getting stung for a large fare and paying with just his thumb. Biometric ID is all the rage in cabs in 2015 apparently. As are parrots.
Arnie awakes in a daze in the back of a cab. He pays the fare with a simple touch of his thumb on the touchscreen taxi meter. He does not even blink at the exorbitant fee. He must be used to surge pricing for Hollywood superstars.
Today while my six year old son was watching a video from his favourite Youtuber DanTDM midway through the video an advert for French beer Kronenbourg 1664 was shown. I was not pleased his viewing was interrupted (when did YouTube start doing ads midway through videos?) as it meant he whined at me, I was even less pleased it was for beer when he is six years old. The UK has very strong regulations around the advertising of alcohol. For a company that is telling everyone it is going to be AI first then I hope they get a hell of a lot smarter before they go fully aware.
Now he was logged in on my account because he can’t have his own account until he is 13 apparently. Either way I don’t think beer advertising is right for Dan’s young audience. My son could/should have been using the awful (one for another post) YouTube Kids app but I do not believe you can access DanTDM through that very poor app. There is so much scope for Google to do far better with this but they seem reluctant / incapable. Clearly their business model is advertising but there are surely ways to advertise to children in far better ways.
I also have a three year old who likes watching YouTube videos too but he has an uncanny side view explore method which means he rapidly gets from watching Super Mario playthroughs to the ten hottest porn star alive. He has obviously been using mummies logon. Visual browsing needs some really smart thinking to stop it getting out of hand.
The boys also watch YouTube through our TV. It can be logged on as me also and safe search can be enabled but still plenty of swearing and violence gets through.
I think the whole aspect of family control over digital services has really not been thought out/done well by many if any companies. I have recently been looking at setting my son a Windows 10 laptop up and they seem to have some good family account controls in place. More on that as I test them. Back to Google though….
What I want from YouTube (and a few other VOD providers and other digital services)
I want a way to allow my children to have their own identities. Why can’t they have logons? They have their own viewing habits and algortimic suggestions then. I want to be able to send video to them. A watch later from Mum & Dad type feature. Why can’t I set my TV to have YouTube levels of access for day time vs night time? or just a kids vs adults feature. Easy to switch between on multiple devices (not easy at all)
I want a multitude of ways to control and analyse those logons. Whitelisted channels. Restricted search terms. Viewing time. Searches. Allow the trust to level up with age or at my decision point e.g. unlock mild violence / swearing as they approach teens. Difficult to design and implement but seemingly just ignoring it is a disgrace.
I want to have sight of what they see. I want to know what adverts they see too. this would be a great feature to add to the Google Dashboard. I would love to be able to whitelist & blacklist advertisers / categories (I am happy for them to see LEGO adverts all day long, Lelly Kelly not so much). How about asking me when I am watching if adverts/advertisers would be suitable for my children. Some people may balk at this but I would prefer them to see adverts transparency over an ability for them to use a service safely.
I have a lot of ideas around this area but this post is a grumpy hot take so I will return to them another day (unless anyone wants to hire me to work on the design of some).
Conclusion
Clearly marketing to children is a very tricky area and there are regulations that make giving children digital identities problematic. I think we need to see services designed to challenge these regulations but also show the potential of services like YouTube as they are used by an ever younger demographic. The challenge of digital identity for adults is complex enough, for children it feels even more challenging.
I don’t want YouTube to do my parenting for me but I want my children to be able to use it as safely as possible without me having to watch through every thing they want to watch first.
There is so much potential in making YouTube an even more amazing service for children. I want them to be suggested new trailers for suitable films, highlight new youtubers who have been approved or recommended by other families as let’s say swearing free. I want them to be able to search for animals or game play throughs or cartoons or NASA videos or whatever rabbit hole they want to tumble down knowing they are going to view something that is appropriate for their age, for their parents and to be advertised to appropriately.
PS I hated Kronenbourg 1664 before this shambles. It tastes like someone has tried to filter piss through a dog blanket.
A little update on my somewhat relaxed search for a new role. February, March and April seem to have passed by very quickly. I had a second interview at a brilliant digital agency but alas they went with someone ‘more junior’ and a few other things are progressing. Apart from that I have been a bit busy with life. I got married, had a minimoon, turned 40, went away to celebrate, my youngest son turned 3, ‘ran’ my first half marathon and then it was the Easter Holidays and all of a sudden May was here. My slightly relaxed job hunt attitude seems a bit foolish/extravagant/nice as it has now been almost 5 months since I left HSBC.
The first week of April I was back on it. Chasing up contacts, asking people for help/contacts/ideas, sending my CV off for some professional polish (nice to see how people phrase things but the formatting they chose did not suit my artistic sensibilities) and went to London to meet some nice people, and have a sort of interview. I also had a couple of responses from things that I thought had not panned out e.g. a recruiter contacted me a while ago about a role so I sent off a CV, initially the company came back rejecting all applicants from that recruiter, then the Monday after that the company had a change of heart and now wanted to interview me. I also got a call from another company I speculatively sent a CV to at the beginning of the year. Maybe after Easter/the tax year is when hiring ramps up again. Either way I have a few interviews / meetings over the next few weeks that will hopefully lead to gainful employment.
I am also in the process of setting up a little site to offer my services, so to speak (I have done the paperwork, bought a domain, set up a site, got a Twitter account etc.) Just in case I fancy trying a little bit of the gig economy. I am trying to work out what those services I would offer are and if anyone has any suggestions please do let me know (opening up myself to abuse there)
As an aside during my search for roles here are a couple of things that I have found strange and a little challenging
One key thing that has struck me has the challenge of switching industries. My desired paths were either traditional consultancies or digital agencies. I have spoken with many people at companies in those industries and I have had a few interviews at digital agencies too. The challenge for me has been aligning what I did at the bank with how these industries operate and that has not been that straight forward. I got one question in an interview about UX which something along the lines of ‘What assets have you produced?’ coming from banking the word asset has many different connotations. I have a basic understanding of UX and the things which make up the discipline but the question kind of threw me in that I had never personally produced traditional UX assets, journey/experience maps, wireframes etc. but I know what they are and how they are made and what their purpose is and their weaknesses but we did not really use them in previous role. Being able to talk more fluently and coherently about the world you are trying to enter is clearly a must. Having said that the creative industries are also aware that their use of jargon maybe prevents a more diverse range of people entering the industry, in fact it shares that in common with finance and a lot of industries I am guessing.
I have spoken with a few people inside consultancies too and they ask things like do you want an internal role or a client facing role, and then they have explained the vast differences between and how people inside those companies find switching between impossible. Switching jobs/industries is hard.
Another language element is that of the job role. ‘What kind of roles were you thinking of in our agency?’ ‘I have no idea can you explain what they actually are?’. I very nearly got a role as an Associate Planning Director. I went for a role as a strategist. These types of roles seem to mean different things at different firms. I have been speaking with other people who say not sure we have any jobs that you could fit into but we could make a role for you. I hope I gt to choose my own job title again.
I like this little video on Brand Republic recently which features marketing folk explaining there roles to other marketing folk and then as if they would to their families. Jargon often hides our misunderstandings. I mean what are above the line and below the line agencies? Is there an on the line agency? Agency of record? Agency of cassette? Agency of minidisc? Client side? in-House? Outhouse?
That language seeps into job advertisements as well. Needing to understand the language to a level that you can decipher what the job adverts are actually asking for. Then trying to relate your own experiences to that of the role inside a completely different world. I really like Phil Gyford’s post about job adverts which kind of covers this as well as some other things that I am searching for.
I think this all comes down to the ability to persuade people that your skills are transferable, your experiences and knowledge can add value to the industry as it looks to transform and help other companies with their digital transformations and finally that you are not a complete idiot. Which leads me onto my next observation.
I was lead to believe that a social profile is very important, that it can open doors. Well it can but when you get through those first doors the second ones are locked and the only key seems to be a good, well formatted, correctly laid out, keyword rich, easily digestible and of course impressive sounding CV. My CV is in Google Docs and I just send the URL to people so they always have the latest version as I tinker with it often. I inevitably get an email back saying they can’t access the link due to the firewall or can I just send them it in Microsoft Word Doc or PDF. Applying to firms looking to help those in need of digital transformation yet they still recruit using the closest thing to virtual paper that we have had for decades.
They seem to need specific formats for their awful automated processes that scan these things and mean you have to have CV in a specific font and size to allow the machines to do the job of looking for keywords. The recruiters I have spoken with have lamented this nonsense and just told me to make sure my CV contains the relevant words and phrases. Who exactly is benefiting from this?
I am not sure what the solution is but the Linked In profile should have the potential to replace the CV? Or could Google make something of a more detailed machine readable profile? or even better some sort of open format alternative that I could host myself? I guess the challenge is getting a read on someone quickly and easily by either a human or a machine. Also the skill of creating one is a task in itself to test someone’s capability at doing a seemingly basic task. I hate writing about myself in such a way (as opposed to 1500 word rambling posts like this). It makes me want to cringe my own skin off but needs must apparently.
I have a CV I have created and I now have something a professional turned into a form they deemed more suitable. I am currently merging the two to make some sort of Frankenstein CV that I am happier with. I also have to write one in a different style for a different industry. Hopefully I will just get a job without the need to really use them. I wish.
And there we have it. I am glad I have gone down the road of being social and open with my job hunt but I am sure we can all agree that hopefully there will not be too many more of these posts. I hope the next post on this subject will be my last and will be entitled ‘The search for an Aden shaped role is complete’. Fingers crossed.
As always I am looking for contacts/advice/opportunities. I am also really wanting some speaking gigs so if any of you organise conferences and want someone to do some reckons then please do get in touch. Please take a look at my slideshare profile, I am updating with a few old presentations to show I can at least put a decent slidedeck together (If only CVs were more like PowerPoint?).
This is the write up/script of a Pecha Kucha-ish talk I gave at the ustwo Fintech Talkies II event on Thursday the 19th of May 2016. What I actually said was recorded on video and will be embedded here when available. There are a few mentions of Monument Valley in here as the game was made by ustwo, this seems to have confused a few people who are seemingly unaware of this fact. Sorry. I have also added a load of links to the end of the preso if people want to read a lot of stuff about PSD2.
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Slide 1: Hello. I am Aden and I want to talk about my favourite bit of European Parliamentary legislation and my worry over its wellbeing. PSD2 is the second iteration of the Payments Service Directive a series of proposals to change to European law around the movement of money and transaction data. It will change the way we bank and I really want it to be successful in doing so.
Slide 2: Here is the legislative beauty. 90 odd pages of almost impenetrable legalese. Its stated purpose is to make a more integrated and efficient European payments market. And to level the playing field. What it means really is to kick banks assess to open up data and cut out dominant middle men from payments. It will introduce two key things. PIS and AIS.
Slide 3: Let me try and explain. Ada wants to buy the complete works of M.C. Escher, she takes out her Mondo card (she strikes me as a Mondo user) and she inputs her card details into Amazon. The payment request goes off to the acquirer, Worldpay – this is routed through the card scheme in use, MasterdCard here and then to Ada’s bank that issued her card. Money sent back for payment to amazon. Amazon keeps the card details on file. Repeat ad infinitum for other merchants. (Thanks to Starling for the inspiration for these diagrams – link to the originals below)
Slide 4: In the new world of PIS. No card details are exchanged. Instead a token based connection is made, The merchant makes a request to Ada’s bank / card provider for a token based relationship to be formed. This then creates a direct link to Ada’s account. Unique to the merchant. Ada is in full control. A failing at the merchant means she does not have to cancel cards. The merchant must be licensed in some way to be able to move money in this way. They will be known as PISPs. This change also cuts out all those other pesky mainly American card scheme and allows new players to emerge, it also starts to make current accounts more platform like.
Slide 5: Let’s now take a look AIS. Here Crow, who is very organised with his finances as he is saving for a curse lifting procedure, Crow has his main account with Barclays and he downloads the transactions manually every so often in CSV format. Crow has a credit card with HSBC and he downloads his transactions in the bloody useless format of PDF because reasons. He swears. He also has a joint account at Lloyds with his crow lover. This is a semi automatic download and he has given his password details over to money dashboard to scrape his transactions. He is a reckless maverick. He then munges all this data together and manages his money the best he can. He caws with disdain regularly and walks around seemingly aimlessly in frustration. (No way I managed to say all this in 20 seconds)
Slide 6: No more pain in the brave new world my Crow friend! Similar to the payment relationships, in the future banks will have to provide an automated and much safer less painful means of transfer. Like the way you would connect your twitter account to a third party app. The consumers of this data must be licensed ins some as yet undefined way. These new information aggregators will be known as AISPs.
Slide 7: Now I don’t know about you but these changes are exciting. AISPs and PISPs could effectively replace a lot of functionality of exisiting banks and allow for some hopefully much richer, simpler, more interesting interfaces, experiences and services. The rules were signed into European Law at the beginning of the year and the EU members must all be compliant with the proposals by the start of 2018….but all is not quite pelvis thrustingly awesome…although to continue the theme slightly
Slide 8: Now as we saw last week, Europe is a beautifully diverse set of countries who interpret things in many ways. When it comes to PSD2 and the need for some solid standards for APIs, communication and security variation and creativity might not be the best thing. The directives need to be transcribed by all 28 EU members into local laws, in the UK this will be part of the Payments Services Regulations.
Slide 9: There is another hitch. There are will be some Regulatory technical standards., RTS for nine areas relating to these changes. The key ones being around communication methods i.e. APIs and strong customer authentication to allow these functions to work. These things are not published yet. They are due ‘this summer’. The final ratification of the standards though could take 18 months. The EBA are confident there will be enough published in time for solutions to be created to meet the deadlines. This feels like shaky foundations to me….
Slide 10: Because we do not want the kinds of people that bought you these bloody things to be cobbling together technical standards that will drive the future of banking. We must not let those that forced the situation of today be in charge of the situation of tomorrow or we will end up with some very uncomfortable solution…
Slide 10a: *Uproarious laughter or tumbleweed and very bemused looks*
Slide 11: The lack of easy access to payments and more importantly data has forced awful workarounds that put brave users at risk and stagnate change for the mainstream. Scraping is a necessary evil and I hate that it has to exit. Thankfully PSD2 sounds the death knell for scraping banking data or at the very least ensures better methods will exist.
Slide 12: Thankfully our own fine land is on it. We have the Open Data Institute pulling together some open standards and bring lots of people to the party, we also have the competition markets authority this week demanding that APIs be ready by Q1 of next year in the UK for certain types of data. I do hope they have the power and the skill to make this happen…although I do have minor concerns about fragmentation of standards…and it is adding yet more committees and requirements and words to the debate…
Slide 13: Which is bringing to mind the classic battle of the Open Systems Interconnection reference model and Transport Control Portal and Internet Protocol. OSI was debated and designed to the nth degree, technically perfect and backed by regulators, industry, engineers alike….but it lost to something simpler yet flawed. This quote from one of the god fathers of the internet sums it up perfectly. I worry PSD2 technical guidelines will drag on because someone wants to make it a beautiful dream.
Slide 14: Meanwhile companies with real vision are living the dream. Brilliant UK based companies like Currency Cloud have shown what real platforms and smart APIs can build, Go cardless made direct debit easy, Mondo and Starling are both building for API driven worlds with current accounts as a platform. Thankfully some bigger banks are there too, BBVA with their open platform and Citi with their mobile API challenges.
Slide 15: Companies like Stripe have proven the power of treating APIs like products, making the developers real customers and making it easier than ever to make things involving the movement of money. They have raised the standards of the industry ten fold, pushing PayPal to buy Braintree, Mastercard and Visa to relaunch and redouble their API efforts regularly. These are the kinds of people I want to ensure are involved in the design of solutions for banking’s future.
Slide 16: Another nice little example that I like is Xignite. They provide market data with lovely APIs, they are building out an ecosystem of parties who all provide data in this same way. More ingredients to build more things. Fintech companies coming together to build something greater than just they themselves ever could. My utopian hippy self wants far more openness and collaboration between financial services firms for the benefit of people who want to make better things.
Slide 17: Because we need to challenge the stereotypical attitude of the banker, they are by no means all like this but still the attitude to PSD2 is this is our data we won’t make it easy for those bastards to just come in and steal our customers because we are shit at making decent interfaces. They need to see that decent APIs will benefit their own developers over anyone else. People being able to make things faster than ever before. The smart ones know this, they know they no longer ‘own the customer’ but that they need to integrate well into the customers whole financial relationship.
Slide 18: Ultimately I want to see the innovative players drive the market. Yes the regulation is welcome and needed. But what will really make the incumbents move is a mixture of regulation and the fear of missing out. Missing out on how banking will work tomorrow, how easily new players launch products and services, how easily business models are mixed and remixed and how their customers bank with the companies that fit into their lives the best.
Slide 19: PSD2 does feel like an illusory adventure of impossible architecture….but is certainly a challenge worth facing but unlike Ada there will be no forgiveness if this does not pan out the way it should. The people who have suffered rubbish banking have suffered long enough. Please let’s not fuck this up.
Slide 20: Thanks very much for listening. Slides and what I was meant to say are published here, I have also included a load of links to more reading material used to make this presentation. If anyone wants to hire me based on my awful presentation puns and passion for European regulation then please do let me know. Cheers.
Video link – Coming soon hopefully
Lots of other links to related material.
PSD2 Framework – http://ec.europa.eu/finance/payments/framework/index_en.htm
PSD2 FAQ – http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-15-5793_en.htm?locale=en
Discussion on RTS on strong customer authentication and secure communication under PSD2 – https://www.eba.europa.eu/news-press/calendar?p_p_id=8&_8_struts_action=%2Fcalendar%2Fview_event&_8_eventId=1303933
EBA Discussion paper on innovative uses of consumer data by financial institutions https://www.finextra.com/finextra-downloads/newsdocs/eba-dp-2016-01.pdf
UK Gov – Call for evidence on data sharing and open data in banking – https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/data-sharing-and-open-data-in-banking-call-for-evidence/call-for-evidence-on-data-sharing-and-open-data-in-banking
Competition & Markets review of banking for SMEs https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/review-of-banking-for-small-and-medium-sized-businesses-smes-in-the-uk
CMA – Retail banking market investigation Provisional decision on remedies(THIS IS GOLD) https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/523755/retail_banking_market_pdr.pdf
UK Open Banking Standard Intro – http://hollandfintech.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/298568600-Introducing-the-Open-Banking-Standard.pdf
OBWG Short Proposal Apr 2016 – https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s6ITjXD1HNUQMmsxdqmmUS8c1UwgLhTXSIr1ZjgxIS0/edit#
Explaining PSD2 – Starling Bank http://starlingbank.co.uk/explaining-psd2/
W3C Web Payments group – PSD2 https://www.w3.org/Payments/IG/wiki/PSD2
W3C first public working draft payment request API https://www.w3.org/blog/wpwg/2016/04/21/first-public-working-drafts-of-payment-request-api/
OSI – The Internet that wasn’t http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt
Programmable Web – Banking API directories http://www.programmableweb.com/category/banking
We live in an age where we benefit greatly from some of the most open and connected technologies ever created. The Internet and the the world wide web built on top of that, have given rise to all manner of technological and societal change. They have seen corporate giants rise upon the shoulders of open and connected, yet they all seem headed towards ever more closed gigantic networks where inter-operation is always at a bare minimum and usually only to benefit themselves, they will let you share outwards in some cases but not all, they will let content in but it must come in through their chosen and tightly controlled methods.
Now I suspect a lot of people will be thinking the answer is blockchain/distributed ledgers/new rails etc. and they might be right but I have avoided mentioning them in this piece. I have avoided them because I am interested in the fixing of the existing system rather than its wholesale replacement. Longer term perhaps new rails will exist but that will not be for decades at least.
I have long desired for banking to be far more open and inter-operable. Open APIs are on the horizon in Europe driven by regulations such as the second Payments Service Directive (PSD2) and UK government initiatives such as the Open Bank Working Group backed by HM treasury. I worry however that these are fragile initiatives even if they are mandatory regulatory changes. The lack of implementation clarity allows for too many opportunities to brick up experiences. Be that making accessing your own transaction data so complicated it is better to screen scrape the data than use official methods. Payment options that are so complex in using that plastic will always be preferred. The closed nature of banking remains even when the rules say open up because of UX disasters.
Mobile payments are also showing worrying trends in heading down these paths. Mobile payments are here yet not quite evenly distributed at the moment. They are tied largely to handset makers (Apple and Samsung Pay), or telcos, or existing card schemes. Interoperability remains patchy at this early stage as the market finds its feet. You need to have phone X or operating system Y and then you need to have the luck of the gods in finding merchants that actually accept your chosen payment method. The big boys are playing for keeps, they want to own the ecosystem as much as possible and they want to lock in the consumer to this perfectly constructed world. The new tech giants are just doing what banks have always done. Is it hubris that their global scale and technical prowess can allow them to succeed where banks have failed? Is it an us vs them story playing out? The new breed vs the old breed? Or is Apple Pay just helping the incumbents become more so? Technological progress is welcome but what is the end game and who will be allowed on the playing field?
My concern is that we will never get the interoperability I, and I am sure many others, desire. What if Sir Tim Berners Lee had patented the World Wide Web? Where would we be today? We have so many innovations limited by their lack of interoperability. We will surely never see a universal dial tone for say video or instant messaging. Even just something like presence, am I available to talk right now? Am I online? Am I in this country or that city?
We have had many great standards to help unify things but they are rejected at every turn and now lay dying. XMPP for messaging, RSS for all manner of content is an afterthought or seen as a historic anomaly. Anyone remember Open Social? An attempt to make interoperable social network components.
Those standards arose from a technical need to solve specific problems I.e. interoperability, and did so well but it is a problem solved that most companies would rather not have solved. Marketing money wants to know who, how many and how engaged the audience they are targeting is. The higher the walls of the garden the more it looks like a barrel and the more users look like fish fresh for shooting.
Those walls also seem to get ever thicker. Bickering between companies feels school yard level as they trade tit for tat blows. Whatsapp users being unable use their Telegram ID in their profile, Instagram and twitter blocking users/photo sharing and all manner of other petty nonsense. I guess when marketing money drives the company though then a barrel is the shape to aim for. What battles will we see between payments companies? Early shots were fired when telcos blocked software based payments like Google Wallet.
The telephone, fixed line and mobile talk too each other irrespective of telco provider, country or make of phone. This took both regulatory change to ensure networks and patents were used to benefit the greater good and avoid monopolies being formed. Email can be routed to any provider and software user due to the open standard of SMTP. Can you imagine if you could only send email to specific email clients Gmail to Gmail, Outlook to Outlook etc? Or Vodafone to Vodafone or Sprint to Sprint? (for some old enough they can probably remember what that was like). Now we acccept these closed networks as the norm as we all have Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp and Snapchat and lots of other messaging apps. I strongly believe this should not happen with financial services.
I cannot pay everywhere.
I cannot get my data from every financial product and use it with other providers or services.
I see this exact same thing playing out in the tech world playing out in the finance world with payments and financial data. Those with the most to lose want to retain control. Those with the most to gain (Tech giants, new fintech entrants) cry for openness but will they reciprocate this in the future once they have a market share outcrop to cling to? Can we build a set of principles and standards that ensure once banking data and payments are opened up they stay open ensuring more and more layers can be built upon them, web like.
I worry for PSD2 because of how the design seems to be happening. Loose guidelines, country specific translations and implementations. Who are the people designing these technical guidelines? Are they bankers or people that understand the web? Can the fintech industry build a solution better/quicker? A better fit for what we need rather than this design by multiple committee stuff that seems to be dragging on and on. Is this regulatory change ultimately just a stick to make the market come up with something better? Will it be OSI vs TCP/IP all over again? Working and well implemented code beating the 172 page page guidelines document?
Money moving is complex and risky. The governance requirements are huge. The liability issues byzantine. I just feel that if we see a few more companies getting some working code (APIs, Auth Methods, Data Standards etc.) then it will make a greater dent in progress. Companies joining forces could do a greater good than yet more committees I reckon. I like the work Xignite has done in joining forces with 21 other companies to form a Fintech API Revolution Ecosystem. I would love to see much more of this ecosystem building, how about just some simple principles or badges of honour for those that make APIs available in FS? Maybe we see banks and FS firms joining initiatives such as the Web We Want (The bank network we want?) Build awareness to allow more building, more inclusion, more access.
The tech giants have built their new gardens and we humans seem to love silos. We love to control and be controlled but these things ultimately limit the scope and scale of technological shifts. They seemingly ensure maximum value can be extracted by the corporate overlords rather than making something bigger, more open that I strongly believe would be better. Will we just end up living in a world where you are either a Google, Apple, Amazon, Alibaba, BBVA ecosystem person and have no choice otherwise?
The opening up of transaction data access and payments instructions is clearly a huge complex change and I have simplified massively but my main point is that walled gardens will lead to fragmented experiences unless you are willing to commit yourself entirely to a single ecosystem owner. The banks have been the ultimate walled gardens as they try to ‘own the customer’ instead of being truly customer centric. They would do well to understand this shift. Excel where they can and make it is easy or seamless for their customers to do business elsewhere. Think platforms and ecosystems not locked in and owned.
Ultimately what is the end game the regulators desire for PSD2? Stop existing incumbents getting an ever stronger hold over the European Payments market i.e. EMVco. To enable greater competition and allow market forces to create a beautiful open ecosystem.
I think PSD2 will eventually crack open the transaction data and payments markets in Europe and hopefully the shockwaves will be felt around the world. The changes proposed however are seen as a real threat to a great many very powerful players and what the country level implementations of PSD2 we finally see in 2018/2019 will look like is a concern. I think the Open Data Institute are doing well to take a lead in the UK but do they wield enough power? Do they have enough momentum? I would like to see more involvement from the W3C. I would like to hear more from HM Treasury and the Competition Market Authority and I believe moves are underway. Also from the governments around the world making openness key. The bottom line is I would like to see a far more open approach to PSD2 from as many parties involved as possible. There are so many people relying on it and it will lead a great change. That maybe too terrifying for those that enjoy the benefits of those huge walls today.
Unless cooperation is forced is the chance of it happening lost forever? Also is the wrong sort of force / design potentially even more harmful? There are industries that need a kick to get started and some industries that need a kick to remember their history e.g. Telcos. I want PSD2 to succeed in cracking the engine open but while the bonnet is up I want to be sure then when it slams shut it’s not all covered in glue and irreparable, licensed components and parts only, registered dealers the only ones allowed to fix and the DIY hobbyist i.e. the individual user is left out.
This all points to a wonderful opportunity for forward thinking financial services players, be they the incumbents or the newer breed but either way I want more of them to work together, to aim for something more open, flexible and altruistic like the web. Altruism and banking might not be easy bedfellows but if you want to be truly customer centric as most keep saying and to truly digitally transform then it would be a wise goal to aim for.
As I look to land a role in London I am also looking for some flexibility in not only working pattern but also commuting services. I want to do three fixed days in London (Wednesday to Friday) and two days from home to begin with. This means I will have to book travel and accommodation on a weekly basis for over forty weeks of the year. There seems to be a real service industry opportunity to help people like me in this position as I assume I am not alone in this pattern of working? Am I? So here are a few ideas that would make my soon to be life a lot easier.
I want to book two trains a week for the foreseeable future. I would like to be able to block book say a months worth of train tickets. This would also enable me to take the best prices available on those routes at my allotted times. At the moment this is a laborious process where I have to book each trip individually. Just a simple repeat this booking for next X weeks would be a fairly simple addition I would have thought.
In addition to this some decent notifications capability around booking would be helpful. ‘Aden your preferred route and time slot is at its cheapest price now and will go up in 24 hours to £x. Book now?’ That is a call to action I will be answering.
The ability to change up or down times of travel more easily would also be great. I often book the last train home to Sheffield which is a killer. It leaves St. Pancras at 22.25 and gets into Sheffield around 1.30. I wish I could easily switch to an earlier train sometimes. This would be a great realtime offer from East Midlands, ping me around 7pm ‘Fancy getting home two hours earlier for just £10?’ Sold.
Why are season tickets only seen as something people who travel every day would use? Why are there no season tickets for a few days a week or even a daily season ticket? I want a year/three months of Wednesdays to London and Fridays back to Sheffield please.
Booking reservations being sent directly to my Google Calendar is a very nice feature but I agree strongly with Ben’s post about why on earth they don’t include the reference number in the headline calendar entry. Fix this please.
Better yet remove the need to collect paper tickets at all. When are trains getting paperless tickets like airlines? An app and a QR code seems easy at the software level, the challenge is the barriers and ticket collectors handheld devices. I think we are a way off that yet for East Midlands trains but we live in hope so there is less rush and hassle at the station just walk straight onto a train.
Similarly to train bookings there is no easy way to block book hotel rooms. I have contacted several hotels to see if any deals are possible and they have quoted me ludicrous business rates which I could get cheaper from any search. Real missed opportunity to build loyalty? I am hoping to get two nights in London for round about £120…the cheaper the better though. Give me your tiniest windowless broom cupboard. As long as it has a bed big enough for me, a shower/toilet/sink and is relatively close to a tube station / my future place of work, then I will be very happy.
I have also considered AirBnB and I wish they had some more commuter friendly options. If I can’t find a regular hotel cheap enough then maybe a deal could be done with an AirBnB host. Try out their flat a few times, get to know the owner see if they will do a block booking off AirBnB at a better price without them taking a cut or AirBnB could build that service (bordering on renting rather than hotel use) and level out the service charges etc. etc. Maybe some sort of auction / VRM style process. I have £120 for two nights for x weeks in this sort of area, who can accommodate me?
Another nice plus would be the ability to store a bag in London. The ability to just leave a toiletry bag and some clean underwear/clothes/phone charger/gym gear/12″ Breakfast Plate would be great. What is the scope for something like that? Hotels? Helpful landlord in the AirBnB scenario, a locker at work perhaps or some sort of locker elsewhere?
Keeping track of what I spend in a month/quarter/year on travel would be a very useful service indeed. Basic Personal Financial Management features for a bank capable. Some service like Expensify could also help here but for ease, built into my bank would be ideal. One day perhaps. Come on Mondo et al.
I am sure when I actually get a job there will be other services I will want to make use of but for now these seems like the most pressing needs. Please someone fix them, especially you East Midlands Trains. If anyone has any pointers for services that can help with these kinds of requests then please do let me know.
Update: Simon White made this lovely observation. If only I had two wheels.
https://twitter.com/purplesime/status/722376689062449153
http://www.eastmidlandstrains.co.uk/frequently-asked-questions/#Bike-reservation
Fintech. A portmanteau of Financial Technology. Now widely used to mean all manner of things it could talk about a hot new financial services startup or the magical image capture of cheques by a mobile device. I wonder if a cheque book encoded with a QR code or NFC tags would be Fintech? More widely and sensibly it seems to mean companies of a certain size and world view that want to improve or disrupt financial services.
It is also regularly bastardised and pluralised as Fintechs to refer to more than one of the certain type of company subjectively deemed as Fintech even though it means financial technology. Fintechs = Financial Technologies surely.
So when is an technological change in financial services not fintech? When it is done by a bank?
What happens if a previous fintech company is bought by a bank? Does it cease to be fintech?
Does the fintech label disppear after a certain time? Are 20 year old PayPal getting too old now to be considered Fintech? If a bank buys a load of Fintech companies does it by osmosis become a Fintech?
Should Fintech be FinTech or fintech?
Underneath the parent brand there are other brands. Insurtech and Regtech to cover specific areas i.e. Insurance and Regulatory technology advancements. We have the amazing brand of Roboadvisor which seems to mean investment advice done by a computer program or for added PR bonus an algorithm or AI instead of a highly paid human. We have the current Queen of buzz the Blockchain. An all encompassing brand covering all manner of ledgers and distributed databases and registers and crypto currency and smart contracts and hyperbole.
They have all come to being out of a subset of existing mega trends and brands such as social, mobile, big data and cloud. These brands has elevated and conflated a series of technological shifts and allowed them to be codified and deified and allow for specialists and snake oil salesman to arise.
The brands are a banner to wrap around all manner of things, or to be stretched across the roof of a bandwagon.
This is both good and bad. The bad is that the brands become so broad they lose all meaning as more things are shoehorned in. The good means that these much needed changes to the staid and needlessly complex world of banking get more focus and investment. Let’s try and focus on the good and not just needless PR for PR sake of the bad.
