Operational Agility

My dream of using my mobile phone to replace all the useless tangible items in my wallet (like cash, credit cards, debit cards, memberships cards, receipts, loyalty cards etc) is clearly some way off, in the UK at least.

Royal Bank of Scotland is the latest UK bank to offer a contactless payment card.  But targeting 12 McDonald restaurants in London by October as being capable of taking the payment?  Exactly what use is that?

Come on UK banks – we need more ambition here.  The technology is surely available to jump the next 14 tiny steps and take one giant leap into the 21st century by enabling us to use our mobile phones as wallets?

Maybe APACS needs to get together with the mobile phone manufacturers and create some standards?  Or maybe we need to think more widely.  Is this a job for Monitise?  I suppose Monitise are too payments focussed, so to get loyalty/membership cards in the mix perhaps Nectar need to get involved too?

Or maybe there is a new business venture here – perhaps a spin-off from a major tech company, a mobile phone manufacture or even a forward thinking bank?

Surely the rest of the world is miles ahead of the UK here – can anyone enlighten me?

I may have to rethink my last post about UK banks not being evil, after reading that Lloyds TSB subsidiary, C & G (formerly Cheltenham & Gloucester Building Society), is shifting 210 IT jobs to offshore centres.

Lloyds has a history of progressively off-shoring IT, call centre, and back office jobs to India, so one can only presume that they know what they are doing and understand the full impact of off-shoring.

I just hope they are doing it for the right reasons and not just to save cost.

What frustrates me most is that we have the means to be so much more efficient in our own country without having to ship jobs to distant, remote locations. Perhaps the problem is one of misguided management, and management turnover, combined with pressures to report results in ever shorter cycles.  If I was a middle manager in a bank, and was targeted with short term cost savings, knowing that in two years I will be in a different job, so my third year measures won’t count against me, then I guess I would take a short term view too.

When you work in an industry as highly regulated as financial services (and I have worked there both directly, and indirectly) you come to expect the odd scandal.  Pensions mis-selling, current account charges, ATM usage fees are just a handful of the recent uproars from financial services customers in the UK.

The latest decent sized revolt has been over “unfair” bank charges imposed on customers whose accounts have gone beyond their borrowing limits.

There is a danger of victimless crime syndrome here.  People who say “the Government should pay for our rubbish to be recycled” conveniently ignoring the fact that the Government is funded by us, the taxpayers.  People who make bogus insurance claims believing that “the insurance company has loads of cash and can afford it”, conveniently ignoring the fact that if everyone took that view, then the insurance industry would implode, meanwhile the do-gooders suffer ever increasing premiums.

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Had to laugh at this announcement from Barclaycard.

The three in one “OnePulse”card:

1.  Chip and PIN card – your regular debit card
2.  Contactless payment card (but only in participating retailers and only in London)
3.  Oyster card (contactless travelcard for the London Underground)

Barclaycard call this “the future of payments in London” which really falls short in ambition for me.

Why can’t I import all that functionality (and more) onto my mobile phone so I don’t need a card at all?  That sounds like the future of global payments.

However, despite this derisory post, I must admit that I will be applying for one, as it does look like the best we’ve got in the UK right now, and at least it means my Oyster Card can go in the bin.  That is, unless Barclaycard have read this and terminate me as a customer!

I was reading this finextra.com article about Barclaycard and Oyster preparing for the launch of the small payments card in the UK (in fact only in London).

Although, as a Barclays customer, and Oyster Card holder, this will mean one less card for my wallet, its only a tiny, rather limp step in the direction of the contactless payments of the future.

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