David GW Birch is Director of Consult Hyperion , the secure electronic transactions consultancy. He is an internationally-recognised thought leader in digital identity and digital money and was named by Wired magazine as one of their global top 15 favourite sources of business information. From the perspective of the payments world, I think 2016 will see the trajectory of the blockchain shift and diverge. To see why, let’s divide the payments roadmap into four areas and look at each of them individually to see how they interact with blockchain technology. These key areas are the technical, business, social and regulatory regions of the roadmap. Technology Trends
There is no need to spend much time on the technology part of the road map because we can already see the important paths opening up: mobile everything, APIs for financial services and the blockchain will all develop throughout the year (irrespective of the specific evolution of bitcoin).
I don’t think I’m sticking my neck out to say that, along with Big Data and cybersecurity, they will all attract more investment from the mainstream financial institutions (and yes, blockchain will be attracting more investment from such institutions).
In our transaction-oriented corner of the world, we are rather into the ECB strong consumer authentication (SCA) drive and obviously that’s started to verge into biometrics.
Apple made the breakthrough of reframing biometrics in the mass market as a convenience technology rather than security technology. That’s been tremendously successful and it’s going to continue, so I expect we will see a jump in the use mass market consumer biometrics in the payments world. Business Blockchains
When it comes to the business area, I think we can see the outlines of some of the key trends.
If you look at the breakdown of European bank income, you see pressure in all […]
