Subscription Billing - MPE Special

EXPERT
I can certainly imagine self-scanning my way around
Waitrose and when I hang up the scanner to leave,
the Waitrose app will pop up on my phone with the
total, ask me to swipe my fingerprint to confirm, and
then Waitrose will instruct an instant payment from
my account to theirs. As a customer, this looks to me
like a familiar debit proposition: I walk out of Waitrose
and the money walks out of my account. The fact that
it never goes near the existing rails is something I
neither know nor care about.
The retailers themselves, especially the millions of
small retailers, will also benefit from this transition
because a variety of new products and services will
spring up to help them to manage their bank accounts,
funding requirements and general financial services
needs. I’m no expert on small business financing
but the ability to see the details of a retailer’s bank
account will surely lead to new opportunities for
specialist financial services providers.
All things considered, 2018 is going to be a pretty
interesting year and I’m very much looking forward
to learning about the new possibilities at Merchant
Payment Ecosystem 2018 in Berlin.
David G.W Birch is an author, advisor and
commentator on digital financial services. He is
Global Ambassador for Consult Hyperion (the secure
electronic transactions consultancy that he helped to
found), Technology Fellow at the Centre for the Study
of Financial Innovation (the London-based think tank)
and a Visiting Professor at the University of Surrey
Business School.
He is an internationally-recognised thought leader
in digital identity and digital money; was named one
of the global top 15 favourite sources of business
information by Wired magazine and one of the top ten
most influential voices in banking by Financial Brand;
created one of the top 25 “must read” financial IT
blogs; was found by PR Daily to be one of the top
ten Twitter accounts followed by innovators, along
with Bill Gates and Richard Branson and was rated
Europe’s most influential commentator on emerging
payments by Total Payments.
His latest book “Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From
money we understand to money that understands
us” was published in June 2017 with a foreword
from Andrew Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank
of England. The LSE Review of Books said the book
should be “widely read by graduate students of
finance, financial law and related topics as well as
policymakers involved in financial regulation”.
Dave graduated from the University of Southampton
with a B.Sc (Hons) in Physics.
31