[Dave Birch] The second of the lunchtime round tables in the Innovation in Payment series will be held at the Innholder's Hall in London on 2nd March 2009. All are welcome, but as space is limited please reserve a place with the CSFI before coming along. This second seminar takes takes a first look at the future of payments by looking back and wondering why it was that people got things wrong when they looked at the future. This is called the "paelo-future". If we can understand why people were wrong about the future (instead of just laughing at how wrong they were) it's one way of making sure that our prediction for the future are more useful. You can download the full invitation here [PDF 89Kb].
It’s very difficult to make predictions, as the old joke says, especially about the future. In the world of payments, it’s especially difficult because money is a subject that many people don’t really understand, including many people who do understand the payment system and its dynamics. Perhaps if we understood better why people got predictions wrong in the past, we could draw up more realistic scenarios for the future. If we are going to help institutions and organisations develop good strategies for the future of this industry, we need to ask why did people get things wrong when they thought about the future and how can we apply this to payments? At this roundtable three speakers will share some ideas about the ways in which business people and technologists look at the future, what they get right and wrong, and how we might inform the discussion about the future of payments with this knowledge. They will each give a quick introduction from their perspective, and then we will have a roundtable discussion with all present. The panelists will be:
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Tom Standage runs the Business section of The Economist and edits their Technology Quarterly. He wrote one of the best-ever books on this topic “The Victorian Internet”, demonstrating clearly that our ability to look at the technology-driven future is very limited.
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Tim Jones helped to create the UK debit card industry with NatWest and has since led two businesses trying to create new payment systems, the bank-led Mondex and the telco-led SimPay. From his background in banking, he is now looking into the future as the head of the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority, at the heart of the government’s pension plans.
- Jon Prideaux joined Visa in Europe in 1989 and saw it grow to an association of 4,600 European banks with 350 million cards in circulation, running a network carrying a trillion euros per annum. Since leaving Visa he now works with a number of companies in the retail, Internet and mobile payments world.
You might never get the opportunity to question them on a panel together again, so please do come along and help us to understand the future of payments by tapping into their collective experience, perspective and knowledge.
Perhaps the most important use of money - It saves time.
Author W. Somerset Maugham (1943).
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