[Dave Birch] I happened to be on an enjoyable panel discussing mobile payments in Copenhagen at a big international conference for corporate treasurers and the subject of the potential competition between banks and telcos came up. I said that I thought that the issue wouldn’t go away, and that it is an issue that has a…

[Dave Birch] One of the principal categories of alternative currency, that has been attracting a lot of attention recently, is local currency. I’ve offer looked at the subject of local currencies and had the general opinion that there is something going on there that will at some point be interesting, but it’s been difficult to…

[Dave Birch] I bumped into a friend earlier today and he mentioned something about AOL. I was a little surprised at first but because I didn’t know that they still existed, but we then had a conversation about what their future strategy might be. I imagine that they are still obsessed with content, and portals,…

[Dave Birch] I was talking to a journalist recently in a context which isn’t really important (but actually involved our work in developing countries) and the conversation wandered on to the role of banks and nonbanks in the provision of payment services using new technology. From one of the questions I was asked, it was…

[Dave Birch] Wow. Willem Buiter is a pretty serious person. He’s Professor of European Political Economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science; a former chief economist of the EBRD and former external member of the MPC. He is an adviser to international organisations, governments, central banks and private financial institutions. In May, he wrote…

[Dave Birch] I was chairing a round table recently when one of the distinguished persons present said to me that the amount of innovation from incumbents in the payment space is lamentable, and it cannot be explained purely by the conservative nature of the 2-sided payments marketplace. We had a brief discussion about possible causes…

[Dave Birch] It’s not clear to me why people think that creating a new world currency would improve the global economic outlook any more than creating a new European currency has helped the European economic outlook, but there’s been yet another call for a single currency for the globe, and this time it’s come from…

[Dave Birch] In John Cooley’s book Currency Wars, he says at one point that there is a grey area actual counterfeiting and the deliberate over-issue of fiat currency. The quantitative easing policy of the British government is likely to be reduce (by inflation) the value of the pound Sterling far more effectively than Hitler’s plans…

[Dave Birch] I interviewed Professor Leo van Hove from the Free University of Brussles (VUB) for a podcast today. He’s starting work on a project trying to obtain a systematic and accurate estimate for the social cost of cash in the European Union. As always, his depth of knowledge and informed assessment of the situation…

Jolly conversationalist at Lift09

Over the last few months, Franco and I have been thinking about what makes a project – a design or service design project, for instance -  fall into the camp of social and ethical design. From that we ended up thinking that those categories needed to be enriched further to consider the…

[Dave Birch] On 27 June 1693, the French Admiral Tourville’s combined Brest and Toulon squadrons ambushed the Smyrna convoy (a fleet of between 200–400 English and allied merchant vessels travelling under escort to the Mediterranean) as it rounded Cape St Vincent. The English and their allies lost nearly a hundred ships with a value of…

Get a digital copy of the kashklash booklet. If you need the high resolution version, just ask, we’ll be happy to send it to you.

[Dave Birch] As is clear from the agenda for the Digital Money Forum from its earliest days, I’ve been interested in the subject of alternative currencies for a very long time. In fact, since the days of the Mondex project, when we (Consult Hyperion) were approached by people who wanted to store their own currencies on…

Hello to kasklash fellows and thank you for animating and feeding the discussion about the future of exchanges with such amazing and passionate interventions.
It is my pleasure to announce you that kashklash is featured at the LIFT09 conference with a workshop and hopefully a dedicated talk. Enjoy the announcement and please consider to join it: you -…

The introduction - “imagine yourself deprived of all of today’s financial resources” - poses a hypothetical future that’s worth serious attention. Sometime in the early ’70s, a couple of bank strikes in different countries were resolved in quite different ways.

One, in France, was quite unremarkable.  The banks were closed, you couldn’t get money, you couldn’t deposit…