LFP022 – 30,000 Feet Overview of Payments with Dave Birch of Consult Hyperion

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Having done a few Alternative Finance shows recently it’s important to recall that there is another hardcore Fintech sector that is already changing the world (as opposed to threatening to in the future). This is payments.

One quarter of the Fintech50 are payments companies and when I looked a little while ago there were well over a thousand on Angelslist. So we definitely need a super sherpa to guide us through this landscape.

Consult Hyperion are an independent technical and strategic consultancy that specialises in secure electronic transactions. For two decades they have been working with technologies ranging from smart cards and mobile phones to contactless tickets and electronic ID in mass-market systems that include global payments, national and regional ticketing, international settlement, national identity and corporate  services.

So I think they might know a bit 🙂

Dave – besides being a member of the Amalgamated Union of Wheeltappers, Shunters and Podcasters was a founding director of the Consult Hyperion, is now their global ambassador and has decades of experience under his belt.

A very rich show with plenty about what is really going on with payments – especially from the strategic big picture perspective which certainly helps put the semi-infinite number of payments startups into some kind of context.

Topics discussed include: – what a global ambassador actually does as a day job 🙂

– the consistency of the three complaints about the payments sector (too slow, too expensive and too opaque) in recent decades  and which of these are driving innovation right now

– the technological changes enabling and driving Fintech payments progress right now

– the importance of regulation in driving change in payments with regulators consistently driving payments away from banks over recent years; the recent EU moves around debit and credit interchange fees (and what they actually are :-D)

– the extra valued-added from new payments players

– deep-dive discussions on what Dave sees as the five key trends in Fintech payments right now:

….In-app payments

….“Re-localisation” (and the two meanings of this)

….Privacy

….Blockchain

….Internet of things

– the trends Consult Hyperion are seeing in the business coming their way at the moment as a weather vane of what is hot in payments

– and much much more 🙂

A very rich and enlightening conversation about the tectonic change in this industry sector!