Casino Royale With Cheese

With a month to go until Money20/20 USA 2023, here’s the story of Money20/20 USA 2014.

Dateline: Woking, 7th September 2023.
Originally: Las Vegas, 5th November 2014.

Casino Royale With Cheese

Part 1: From Guildford With Love

Miss Jessica Moneysatoshi looked up.

“She wants to see you, you know.”

“I know, I know” said Bond.

He strode up to the second floor, coffee in hand, and poked his head around the door.

“Good morning G.” he said, a thin layer of glossy cheerfulness covering up the resonance of his gin soaked tonsils, having come straight from the club to work. There was no fooling her though. She knew him too well.

“Now listen here Bond,” she started in the schoolmistress tone she took with him on occasion, “you know perfectly well that there’s a new mission for you and you were supposed to be here at nine sharp to get started”.

Bond was looking across her shoulder and out of the window where a sparrow was hopping along the windowsill, avoiding the insistent drizzle that blanketed the garden, the car park and the old folks home across the way.

“What is it this time G.? Let me guess. You want me to trick those Ukrainian gangsters into attacking another big US retailer? Come on, we’ve done it 100 times, they are still no closer to chip and PIN. Isn’t it time to move on?”

G. sat back in her chair.

“You know I don’t choose Bond. I do as I’m told, and so should you. But, as it happens, this is a big one. The boys and girls upstairs think that the Cold War might be coming to an end. We think there’s going to be some trouble. We think we have an opportunity.”

Bond watched the disconsolate sparrow flutter to a nearby branch. He had no idea why they called it a Cold War. It was hot, very hot. To the general public, the credulous bloggers, the useful idiots in the newspapers and everyone else it looked like a Cold War. But Bond knew what was going on behind-the-scenes, and it was vicious.

“You’ve heard about the mobile wallet I suppose, Bond” she said turning back to her desk and reaching for an iPad covered in Post-it notes.

“Of course” said Bond, “they’ve been talking about it for years. Some sort of secret weapon. The banks and the retailers and the telecommunications operators and brands and uncle Tom Cobleigh and all were trying to get their hands on it, weren’t they?”

As Bond was talking his brain was warming up and by the time he got to the end of the sentence he realised what it was that G. was saying to him.

“Wait,” he leaned towards her. “You’re saying it’s real!”

He looked at the map on the wall. Her silence told him everything. A shiver ran down his spine, shaking off the remnants of last night in his nervous system.

“Well, well. The mobile wallet is real. Just like the red mercury I spent my Africa days chasing. How exciting. Where is it? Who’s got it right now G.”.

If it fell into the wrong hands, the results could be terrifying. Sure, no-one cared about the U.S.A or U.S.S.R any more. Those old certainties were gone. Countries don’t matter when it comes to commerce. But if M.C.X or A.P.P.L.E, got hold of it, it would be game over. Everyone in the digital economy would be under their control. And they knew it. 

“That’s the problem,” she said. “We don’t know. You, James, you’re going to find out for us.”

Part 2: The World Wide Web is not Enough

Bond was standing in S.’s lab looking at the device that had been precisely placed on the desk in front of him.

“I don’t want to appear uninformed, S. old chap, but it looks like an iPhone”.

“Exactly” said S, secretly pleased by James’ first response. “That’s exactly the point. It is an ordinary iPhone. But get this. We’ve loaded a standard EMV token into it and we’re going to send it across to a standard retailer terminal to do a secure payment. “

This was sounding more interesting already. “How?” Said James, turning the sleek slab around in his fingers. “This is an iPhone 5s and it doesn’t have a contactless interface.”

Just the opportunity that S. had been looking for. He got up and walked across to the whiteboard on the far wall and started sketching.

“As you know James, we need to use Host Card Emulation, or HCE, to make the terminal think that the phone is a standard contactless card. While this phone doesn’t have a contactless interface, as you correctly remembered, we’ve come up with another option. We are running the HCE transaction over the Bluetooth low energy interface. “

Nice, Bond thought. He lifted the phone. Ambient light sensor. 40 hours audio playback. Lithium-ion battery. 3.5mm stereo jack. TouchID sensor. H.264 video. 1280×720 pixels. 1080p video. HE-AAC. 8 megapixel camera. Hybrid IR filter. BLE 4.0. GPS/GLONASS. 800:1 contracts and 802.11n wifi. Nice kit.

“You devils”, said James. “You mean you can run full EMV transactions using the same app in iPhones and Android handsets, using the kind of Bluetooth interface that the retailers are installing for marketing purposes, except using it for transactions.”

S. smiled. He amazed himself sometimes.

“That’s not all James. The Hyperlab boffins have also got an app running on the Samsung S5 that uses the FIDO client embedded in the TEE and the handset fingerprint recognition to do secure authentication in a standard framework. We may not have a mobile wallet, but we’ve got all the pieces. All you have to do is find out who’s putting them together. Who is adding two and two to make five?”

By the time he got back to his desk, Moneysatoshi was there with the confirmation code for his plane reservation to Vegas and the directions to the Aria hotel.

“She wants to see you again”, said Moneysatoshi. James turned on his heels and walked over to G.

“You’re going to Money2020,” she said. “7,500 of the world’s leading payment professionals. If anything were to happen to them, the result could be devastating. In anywhere between three and five years, people would begin to notice that their credit cards hadn’t been reissued for a while and that the swipe terminals in shops were getting a little dated. We can’t let that happen James.”

Bond nodded, more to show her that he understood the gravity of the situation than to let her know he understood her point, and then asked the obvious: “How will I get in?”

“I’ve got our best people on it right now”, G. said. “All we’ve got to do is get into the Money2020 computer and search through the delegates to find one for you to replace. The girls downstairs have been told to search through to find a handsome, articulate and charming Englishman that women cannot resist. Then you can take his place.”

As she was talking, Moneysatoshi came in, waving around a picture on her smartphone screen.

“They’ve found the perfect one, G.”, Moneysatoshi reported, excitedly. “They haven’t got a name yet, only a Twitter handle, but they’ll have the details for you soon”.

“Twitter handle”, said Bond, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes,” said Moneysatoshi, holding the screen up for James to see. “See. It’s @dgwbirch”.

Part 3. Mag Stripes are Forever

Bond, G. and S. were poring over the paperwork, double-checking all the angles. After a while, G. (who seemed satisfied that everything was in place) stood up and turned to Bond. “One more time, James, and then you can go.”

Bond began to recite.

“The real @dgwbirch has been intercepted at the airport and told that the Las Vegas Blues, the local branch of the Manchester City Supporters Club, are having a marathon Dungeons and Dragons tournament at the IHOP.”

Bond looked down at his phone. “Actually, chaps, it seems he got there quicker than we expected, so we’d asked one of the American operatives for help. He put rohypnol in the maple syrup: I don’t think the real @dgwbirch will come round for a couple of days, and if he does, they are under instructions to put more pancakes in front of him”.

“Then,” said G., “you’d better get going.”

Half a day later, and Bond was standing outside the Aria hotel in Las Vegas. He took a deep breath. He’d been practising conversational Geek on the plane all the way over, drawing on his service training to try and pick out the key words and phrases so that he could get by. He had tried a couple out on the woman across the aisle.

“I think the UK FPS was great,” he said, “but why did the idiots go with pants like 8583 when ISO 20022 XML offers so much more”.

He wasn’t able to judge whether the phrase had worked or not, because the woman across the aisle had inexplicably passed out and was audibly snoring.

Well, Bond thought, she must have been very tired indeed, and went back to the phrase book. Practising to himself, he tried a few more basic phrases.

“No, you dipstick, the liability shift doesn’t affect gas pumps until 2017”.

“Get with the program Grandad, we use Venmo for that”.

“You can’t turn off ApplePay, since the terminals cannot tell whether they are talking to a phone, a card or a sticker, so you have to turn off the 14443 interface completely.”

He had no idea what any of this meant, but he was confident he could get by in social situations. After all, the head honchos don’t know what any of it means either.

He felt ready to go now though, so he checked in at the Aria under the pseudonym “David Birch” and strolled along the promenade level to the convention centre. When he got there, he went to the Money2020 registration desk. “The name is Birch,” he said. “David Birch”.

Unfortunately, while there was indeed a reservation in that name, the associated credit card had been declined because of fraud prevention algorithms, so Bond took out the specially-made substitute. He had a moment’s panic as he handed the card over, as he suddenly realised that, of course, since you can’t clone EMV cards, the payment terminal would be sure to reject it. His heart was in his mouth for a moment, until he remembered that he was in the US, where they don’t have EMV terminals. Phew! What a relief.

In fact, as it turned out they didn’t have any terminals at all, so his card details were laboriously typed into a web form. He had a twinge of nostalgia watching the process, remembering how that was how things were purchased on the web twenty years ago. It’s all so different now. Or at least it will be in 2020.

She was good. Very good. It didn’t take her more than 5 or 10 minutes to make the payment and then she handed him the badge in Birch’s name. He was in.

G. had told him to rendezvous with the beautiful and deadly Agent F. as soon as he could, so Bond walked down to the exhibition floor. By coincidence he saw F. coming out of the Media Room. Or at least he thought it was her. He couldn’t be sure, so he stood behind her and whispered the code phrase:

“Tokenisation is a network solution to a network problem”.

She tilted her head to one side and whispered back the confirmation code phrase in an Eastern European accent that he placed as Romanian.

“Tokenisation with all stakeholder input would not involve a PAN”.

Bond nodded.

“Follow me”, she said, and walked away.

Bond followed her at a distance to not attract attention. After a couple of minutes and a couple of twists and turns through the maze of booths, Agent F. stopped. They were in the map room. Agent F.’s people had plotted reports of mobile wallets being seen around the world and together they spent some time discussing possible patterns, possible trajectories. As they did this, Bond began to feel a distinct sense of worry, starting in his abdomen and steadily working it’s way up. None of the reported sightings were anywhere near M.C.X territory.  What if there’s not going to be a balance of power?

Half an hour later and Bond was two floors up, trying to get through the crowd to get into one of the rooms to see what people talking about payments looked like, but it was hopeless. The crush was unbearable, and he couldn’t break cover by karate-chopping his way through. He needed to be anonymous for a while, so he slipped back into the crowd.

Somewhere further back, he could hear a strange murmur. It got his attention. He moved back through the crowd, trying to locate the source, but it seemed to be coming from every direction. As he tuned in, he realised it was not murmuring but chanting. He thought he could make out a few words from the rhythmic growl.

“Hare, hare… hare, hare… hare, hare… hare Bitcoin”.

His ears pricked up. He’d come across this strange cult before on a previous mission to Prague. That time, they were in a hotel, trying to encourage impressionable, insecure and gullible bankers to come and join them.

When Bond got to the back, he saw chains of these blockheads running all the way across the room. They were evangelising, handing out leaflets that promised a new dawn, a better life. They were reaching out to grab passing Visa and MasterCard people to share their ecstatic vision. “No more interchange fees!” he saw one of the babbling devotees cry out and fall to the floor, speaking in tongues, a meaningless gabble about remote proof of work, distributed ledgers and trustless asset management.

A hopeless case, Bond thought as he walked passed. No way back for that poor chap. Just then, A Wickr from G. came through with some interesting news. It seems one of the big data analysts had been scouring Gmail meta and had found an unexpected, but useful, connection. 

“BOND”, G.’s message said, “@DGWBIRCH is Illuminated #fnord”.

Now, that put a different complexion on the rest of the day. While the service didn’t know which Illumanti group he was with, the fact he was with any of them should make it easier to open some doors. Was he with “The John Dillinger Died For You Society”? The Friends of Modo? Or the “Discordian Society”? The “Servants of Cthulhu”? The “W3C Web Payments Group”?

Hard to know. But Bond knew just the man. One of his oldest friends, and oldest Illuminati friends at that. And what’s more, Bond had just seen him stroll across the lobby. It was the debonair Frenchman Sebastien Taveau, one of the most powerful men in payments, the MasterCard OpenAPI guru. Bond intercepted him as he came through the casino, steering him round the corner and into a quiet spot behind the elevators.

“Seb old man – am I pleased to see you. Can I have a word?”

Part 4. The Spy Who Paid Me

Seb drew on his Gauloise and told James not to worry, he would make a few calls. Sure enough, when Bond returned to his room, the invitation was already under his door. It wasn’t the Bavarian Illuminati, it was a new group that was so secret it wasn’t even on the service’s radar: the Payments Illuminati.

So they were right. Despite the cover of banal, nauseating and repetitive transparency, there were a lot of secrets behind the @dgwbirch facade.

Bond showered and changed. He thought carefully about the evening wear and eventually decided on his favourite Buffalo Exchange charcoal grey Ralph Lauren shirt, set off nicely by the Eddie Bauer chinos and the Clarks’ Walking Boots. As he rode the escalator down to the casino, Bond was pleased to see how much he looked like two-thirds of the delegates. Perfect. He went straight to the bar and found a woman standing by herself. “Gin and tonic please” then, as she turned, “stirred not shaken”. When she came back with the drink and the bill on her tray, he handed her the card that S. had assured him would mark him out as one of the crowd.

She handed it back. “Picture ID please’.

Flattered that she thought he was under 21, Bond flashed her a cheeky grin, thinking she was having fun with him. She stared back with a poker face. “Picture ID please”.

Now he had a problem. Yes, S. had given him a driving licence in name of “David Birch” before he left, but like any normal person he had left it locked up in the safe in his hotel room. He could go and get it, but the waitress might be an agent or a terrorist or a fraudster. He didn’t want to give her a fake ID that she might detect, nor did he want to leave her with details including his date of birth and home address.

While he was stroking his chin wondering whether to start a disturbance and make off with the gin and tonic in the ensuing chaos, he realised that a raven-haired beauty was gesticulating from the bar. The simple, two-fingered gesture was known only to the Brits, so she must be one of the American operatives put in place to keep an eye on him he guessed, and walked over. He pretended to stop for a moment to check his phone. In a practiced almost invisible move, he snapped her picture and sent it up to Division F. By the time he reached her, her details had been flashed across his laser-powered secret display spectacles.

“Hello Miss Simon. I don’t suppose you could help me out?”

He explained the identity predicament. She paid for the drinks and invited him on to the sofa with her, where he was surprised to see N. from HQ nursing a drink. Clearly the powers-that-be saw this operation as a big one if they’d sent N. to keep an eye on him.

“So”, she said after a moment or two, shaking her curls as she did so, “what are you doing in Vegas?”

After a stiff one or three, Bond set off to the secret location in the Hakkasan restaurant at the MGM Grand. Seb had given him the right phrase to get in — “Rodger Desai knows me and Bruce Parker soon will” — so in a few minutes he was sitting at a long table, being served exquisite Asian delicacies one after the other. Dim sum that split open to give stunning flavours, roasted pork that melted in his mouth, fluffy rice fragrant with herbs and spices.

As the evening wore on, Bond kept glancing along the table toward the inscrutable Parker and tried to pick up what intelligence he could without asking any questions that might raise suspicion. None of the people round the table had much in the way of answers, but he did come across a wise Indian guru who whispered “electronic gift cards” and then carried on talking as if he’d never met Bond before in his life which, of course, he hadn’t.

But he did pick up one nugget that he determined to pass back up the chain as soon as he had the chance. One of the charming dinner guests had said that a bank he knew had been “negotiating” with A.P.P.L.E about putting the bank credit card in some sort of mobile wallet. It was real.

Part 5. The Man with the Golden iWatch

As Bond walked around the corner, he realised something was wrong. Very wrong. Not only was he up and about at 7 in the morning, but out of the corner of his eye he saw a man walking towards him with a fixed grin and a psychopathic stare. He looked like a KAOS killer.

That wasn’t Rodger Desai! Bond had studied Rodger’s file — well, LinkedIn profile — before heading over to the MGM. So that was why he’d been missing from the Illuminati dinner. They had him. But who were they? A.P.P.L.E? M.C.X? One of the Far Eastern groups? Some splinter group hoping to exploit Rodger’s considerable lead in using mobile phone data support device-based authentication?

Bond darted into the milling crowd and let himself get carried along by the bustle. He fell into a river of people that carried him through the doors and into the main conference room, where a few thousand of the faithful were waiting to hear from the Reverend Weiner and some of his powerful friends. Bond slid sideways, making sure he wasn’t being followed, and walked to an empty chair near the front, in the light, where he could clearly see any movement in either aisle. Just as he sat down, a couple of PowerPoint jockeys from McKinsey, which is a management consultancy, said that there were six key themes to the event this year: POS evolution, security, cryptocurrency, credit models, globalisation and partnerships. Putting the last two to one side because he could imagine what they might mean in general terms, Bond had no idea what they were talking about, but nodded sagely like the rest of the audience around him.

Just then, he saw a flicker of movement in the corner of the room. A shadow slipped out of a side door: Bond was on his feet in two or three minutes and out into the corridor. He went down an escalator and found himself in a vast exhibition hall, where vendors from around the world were exhibiting all manner of products and services. Then he saw him, sitting in a far corner and trying to look inconspicuous, was he the cat-burglar Bond was sure he had seen upstairs. Blocking the man’s exit, Bond knelt and pretended to tie his shoelace.

“Who are you working for, friend?”

Nothing. The intruder remained impassive. Bond moved closer.

“Listen to me. I don’t care who you are working for, A.P.P.L.E or M.C.X or anyone else, let me give you a message to take back to your head honcho. We know that the mobile wallet is real, and I’m going to make sure that people know all about it. So if you, or anyone else, thinks that they can keep it to themselves, they are dead wrong. Our view of the national interest is clear: we need a balance of power and competition. If either side gets total control of the mobile wallet, the potential for abuse is too great. Do you understand?”

Nothing. The man in black refused to say a thing, and Bond thought it better not to waterboard him in daylight, so he stood up to think. Perhaps he should make his way back up to the keynote session before he was missed.

Bond settled back down again. A chap from Visa was talking about a new approach to partnership and co-operation, opening up the “edge of the network” through APIs. It all sounded jolly good to Bond. There was something that puzzled him though. At the Aria hotel, where this Money2020 was being held, and where all of these people were supposed experts in retail payments, there were no contactless terminals so no-one could tap their phones to pay, no in-app payments so no ApplePay or Google Wallet, no chip-and-PIN terminals, and you had to produce photo ID to buy a coffee as well as a drink at the paper. The staff gave you pieces of paper to sign when you bought something. Bond didn’t know what you were supposed to write on the paper, and he didn’t want to ask anyone, so he just chose an exotic sounding name and wrote that each time. Sergio Aquero, Bruno Zuculini, Pablo Zabaletta, Willy Caballero, Martin Demichelis. No-one seemed to care.

This apparent paradox — of supposed payment experts who he never saw using either “tap and pay” or “app and pay” — was still nagging at the back of his brain when a strange thing happened. A pair of rich white men (who looked so similar they might be twins) came out on stage and started talking about people bartering fish for goats — or something along those lines — 10,000 years ago. Bond was absolutely baffled. This was obviously some weird ritual that the boys back home hadn’t seen coming. He glanced left and right to see how to respond, but all around him people were getting up and leaving, which struck him as dashed rude of them. A gentleman, Bond thought, should always sit and listen to another gentleman’s talk, even if it is all guff.

Part 6: Dr. NoAuth

“Oh come on G. For goodness sake! How am I supposed to get into the Women 2.0 reception? It’s just not possible. I suppose you want me to shave my legs and wear a cocktail dress?”

G. was insistent. “It’s important. We need to know if Women 2.0 is an Illuminati front or a genuine attempt to recruit and retain woman in the payments workforce.”

He was adamant. “I’m not doing it G., I’m not. Dash it all, there are some places where a chap just does not go, like IKEA on a Sunday”.

G. smiled. “Come on James. You’ll find a way.”

Bond set off for the bar trying to think of a plausible way to make it up to the 38th floor. There was no way past the guard at the entrance to the elevator and he didn’t think you’d be able to scale the outside of the building without being noticed, so out of ideas he went to the lobby bar to think. Walking in, he quickly scanned the throng, looking for the kind of powerful woman he would need to help pull this one off. He saw her sitting on a white sofa and in one movement glanced at the passing waiter and slid down onto the comfortable leather. He put out a hand.

“Birch, Dave Birch”.

She reached out a hand in response.

“Realini, Carol Realini.”

Twenty minutes later he was riding up to the 38th floor.

Bond wasn’t quite sure what to expect as he walked through the door. He hadn’t really given it much thought, but he wasn’t that keen on spending a couple of hours talking about breastfeeding rooms and freezing eggs when he could have been playing Blackjack downstairs. When he went in, though, it turned out that they were talking about empowering women entrepreneurs. That gave him an idea…

After listening to the talk, Bond went next door to get something to eat. With a gin and tonic in hand he made small talk until the buzz from his phone signalled a text message. He glanced down. The biometrics expert had arrived and he needed to talk to her so he invited her up, thinking that as she was a) a woman and b) an entrepreneur, she would provide him with the perfect cover.

Bond broke out a genuine smile as his old friend Max came in.

“Hey Max. Great to see you. How have you been keeping?”

They found a quiet corner and Max explained to him all about fingerprint sensors and false accept rates and false reject rates and crossover curves and sensitivity and reproduction and the difference between matching templates and searching databases for approximate collisions. As she talked, Bond began to realise the difference between identification and authentication, and he began to think about what that might mean in a retail payments context. The fog cleared.

“Ah.” said James, picking up the implications of what Max was saying. She was saying that the A.P.P.L.E fingerprint system looked as if it was something to do with security, but was really to do with convenience. It was the two-factor authentication with the device that was the key, and it didn’t really matter if you used a fingerprint or a PIN or something else.

 So A.P.P.L.E had stumbled on a configuration that delivered the right balance of factors. Strong local authentication against a secure biometric template linked to a revocable token stored in tamper-resistant hardware. You had to give it to those Cupertino wallahs’. They knew what consumers wanted, which was lucky because banks didn’t (and neither did the consumers, for that matter).

Part 7: You Only Pay Twice

Bond strode confidently through the door of the two-floor suite on the 58th floor, taking in the breathtaking view of Vegas, the three burly security guys, the bar at the far end of the room and the crowd in one measured, experienced glance. The boys in the back room had hacked into Tom Noyes’ PC and edited his Excel spreadsheet of top payments bods to add @dgwbirch’s name, so he was now on the guest list.

As Bond circulated, mixing with the payments high and mighty, he kept his payments sixth sense turned up to 11. If they were going to be anywhere, the agents of A.P.P.L.E and M.C.X were going to be here. This was where the power was and if anyone doubted it, they need only look at the fine figure of a man blocking Bond’s way.

The noble gait, the piercing intelligence, the handsome visage and the steely glare of a determined and successful payments executive could only be explained by one thing: this was a man who had bought “ Identity is the New Money ” at the full retail price and read it from cover to cover. Bond didn’t need to check this man’s bag out: he knew he’d find a well-thumbed copy there.

Bond was looking some of throng up on his smart phone when the main host Tom Noyes walked over to him. Bond acted quick'ly, and made it look as if he was taking a selfie. He had read about them in The Telegraph recently and knew they were all the rage. So he smiled at the nearest CEO, Ted from Kik Messenger, held up the camera and snapped. It was only when he looked at the picture later that he realised that the mysteriously missing Rodger Desai was in the picture behind them! What on Earth was going on? How had Desai got past security? What was he up to? Bond began to realise that the picture was more complicated than G. and her masters suspected.

Standing at the bar with a fresh gin and tonic in his hand, puzzling over the clues he had accumulated, Bond began to scan the assembled luminaries. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, he was just looking for any little clue as to the power structures behind the scenes. He was distracted for a moment by a beautiful woman who emerged from the crowd. Bond nodded to her.

“Didn’t I see you at the Woman 2.0 reception?” he ventured, but she wasn’t buying it.

She turned to a companion and began talking about San Francisco. Ah, he thought, San Francisco. For a moment he was transported to the city by the bay, remembering the lazy days and busy nights he had spent there.  Snapping out of his daydream he scanned the room again. Nothing. He set out to circulate, and kept up the small talk, using some of the phrases he had picked up during the day.

“It’s not about payment, it’s about the value-added services around the payment” he told David Sears from Skrill.

“Well, for the big merchants it’s not about tap-and-pay it’s about app-and-pay” he told Osama Bedier from Poynt.

Then…

“Did you see Tom’s panel ? When President Cook asked that question to the Commander-in-Chief of Visa?” he heard a man somewhere behind him say.

“Oh man”, said the second voice. “He was tough.”

“Really?” the first man mused. “I’m not so sure. We had some of our top analysts go through that in slow-motion, and that’s not what they thought. We’ve got one or two people who are fluent in Walmartese, and their interpretation was a little different from the standard translation. They think that Cook is thinking about a future cease-fire agreement with A.P.P.L.E and asking the networks to give lower rates for in-app purchases.”

At that moment, a slim man dressed in a natty jumper walked passed, and in a lilting and strangely comforting voice, addressed both of them.

“Card-Present and Card-Not-Present are outdated concepts. They have no place in the modern age. We must replace them with Cardholder-Present and Cardholder-Not-Present” he said, an expression of calm enlightenment draped over his youthful features.

A.P.P.L.E were here. Bond gasped. They had penetrated to the very highest level of the Aria. Nowhere was safe.

Bond followed the young man to the bottom of the staircase.

“I know why you’re here”, said Bond, “and you’re not going to get away with it. You’re not going to control all of commerce. I don’t fall for your ‘easy payment’ waffle. I know it’s just a trojan horse for your wallet play: loyalty, coupons and — if you have your dastardly way — identity.”

The young man stared at him, impassive throughout.

Bond mused for a moment, and then tried another tack.

“Were the end of CP/CNP rules and rates for SE-based in-app tokenised payments part of the negotiations between A.P.P.L.E and the banks?”

Another voice from behind…

“There were no negotiations, Mr. Bond. And there will be no negotiations with you either, unless you sign this NDA.”

Bond turned and ran for his life. He knew that signing an A.P.P.L.E NDA would mean a lifetime of servitude, so he ran. He ran out into the corridor and down to the elevator bank. Ahead of him he saw the suave figure of Peter Burridge, arm-in-arm with the woman Bond had spoken to earlier. Bond slowed, walked ahead of them and held the elevator open until they were both inside.

The door closed and he pressed the button for the lobby with a visceral sense of relief, the adrenaline draining from his system. It looked as if the mobile wallet was already in A.P.P.L.E hands. M.C.X would have to use the nuclear option.

Part 8: Live and Let Tap

Bond set off for a walk. He hadn’t gone a hundred yards before his path was blocked by a pair of ice-cool blondes who asked him what he was drinking. “Gin and tonic” he said, extending his hand. And then he tried his new standard opening move. “Didn’t I see you at the Woman 2.0 reception?”.

After a couple of stiff ones, it all got a little blurry. When Bond’s head cleared, the ice-cool blondes had vanished. Bond needed to rethink. He decided to try a different tack and, going back to his basic training (Miller Heimann training, that is) came up with a simple plan. He would try to pass himself off as a harmless idiot and hide in plain sight in the teeming throng. So, he mused, what would an idiot do in Las Vegas after a few drinks? As he stood under the Fremont Street canopy, tapping his feet to the thumping cover of Pitbull’s “Timber”, he saw the answer. Of course! A tattoo!

But what? Bond thought carefully. It would have to be something about money, because if there were any tattoos on the delegates at the Aria, they would definitely be about money. And it should be something about the future of money. Bond had read Birch’s indispensable guidebook to the future “Identity is the New Money” while back in the UK, so he knew that the future of money was somehow tied to communities. Not necessarily those based on geographic regions, but also those based in regions of virtual space, where members of communities with shared values might use new technology to create currencies that incorporated those values. Bond smiled. He had the perfect motto. Now all he had to do was remember his Latin from the Lower Sixth.

Cuis regio, euis pecunia.

Literally, it means “whose region, his money”. In the context of the technology-fuelled speculation of the Aria crowd, though, it is also a witty comment on the relationship between regulation and currency. With that, Bond was sure, he would fit right in.

Bond woke up the next morning with a hangover and a headache. The hangover was because of the cheap gin that the ice-cool blondes had been plying him with, the headache was because he remembered that he done two really, really stupid things while drunk. First , he’d got that damn tattoo. Second, he had agreed to talk at the ice-cool blonde’s Workshop on Digital Commerce at the Mandarin Oriental at 9am . He stayed in bed for a few moments, watching the sunshine play along his arm, watching the dust mites rising from the warming sheets, watching the alarm clock tick towards 7am.

The walk in the fresh morning air had actually done him a lot of good. As he strolled along in front of the casino, he couldn’t help but think how wrong everyone had been a couple of years ago, when it had been fashionable to think that the ruthless command-and-control world of A.P.P.L.E could not compete with the capitalist innovate-and-compete world of M.C.X. Sooner or later, we’d all thought, A.P.P.L.E would have to tear down its walled garden and deliver freedom to the fanboys trapped with their iTunes libraries on the wrong side of history. But it hadn’t worked like that. President Cook of M.C.X could guide the warring factions but he couldn’t compel them to doing anything. On the other hand, Chief of the Politburo Cook of A.P.P.L.E could order his massed legions to do anything. Anything at all.

Bond took a deep breath and walked into the workshop.

Part 9: For Your iPhones Only

Bond had sent word back to S. asking for emergency support as soon as he’d got up. He’d sent an urgent telegram by e-mail to Miss Moneysatoshi and asked her to take it to S. as soon as he arrived in the building.

“HELP. HAVE ACCIDENTALLY AGREED TO GIVE KEYNOTE TALK STOP. THE IMPACT OF APPLEPAY ON OTHER ECOSYSTEMS STOP. NEED PLAUSIBLE 30 MINUTE SPEECH. STOP.”

S. and the first floor boffins did not disappoint. The message from S. came through just as Bond walked through the door of the Mandarin Oriental. Apparently, the big brains at Consult Hyperion had been asked to prepare a report on HCE and Tokenisation for the GSMA and it was already in Bond’s in-box. 

Bond pulled it up, grabbed a few strips of crispy bacon and a coffee, and was delighted to discover that the report was so well-written, so clear and accessible, so insightful, that by the time he stood at the lectern he knew exactly what he was going to say. 

He began by explaining that because of the ApplePay architecture, which endorsed the hardware secure element (SE) and local authentication against a revocable token as a the chosen platform, the advance of tokenisation services would be swift. While the banks were currently using network tokenisation platforms, some would move to in-house and others to third-party services so a market would develop. This, in turn, reduced the marginal cost of applying tokens to other implementations and this, in turn, re-invigorated HCE. Tokens with appropriate token constraints set were a cost-effective way of bring standard payments to other platforms whether they had SE or not.

It went well.

He pulled it off.

Mission accomplished, Bond set off for the exhibition floor to see if he could pick up any intelligence from the buzz around the myriad vendors. At one point, he saw a few Hare Bitcoiners in the distance, so he slipped behind a curtain to avoid them. While he was there, he realised he could overhear a conversation from around the corner. He couldn’t tell who was speaking, or indeed what they were speaking about (something to do with Stella forking Rippled, but he had no idea who Stella was or whether the Rippled chap was one of us or not). But then he heard the distinctive voice of a Venture Capitalist chime in.

“Don’t let them know”, the VC said in a sinister drawl, “but we don’t care about their stupid play money pretend currency. Let them have fun with that. We want control of the blockchain.”

The blockchain? What was the blockchain? It must be something that A.P.P.L.E or M.C.X were working on, but then Bond heard another man.

“If we can move to an open, distributed, public ledger for digital assets, it will transform society let alone commerce. No-one will be able to control it. No-one”.

No-one? Not Facebook or Google or Amazon or Microsoft or A.P.P.L.E or anyone else? No-one? This sounded like information he needed to get back to the bods upstairs right away. Bond took out his Moleskine and was about to make notes but at that exact point, the curtain opened a crack and he was temporarily distracted by the free Haagen-Dazs, and when he turned back, the men were gone. So he went back for another coffee almond crunch and resolved to make his way through the crowd and go to a session.

Flashing a smile at the woman on the door, Bond strode through into a payments cavern. A room of 1000 people, listening to a distant panel discussion, only visible because of the enormous monitor hovering above the stage. Bond was looking at the panel, he was looking at the crowd. He was looking for the furtive glance, the shielded exchange of business cards, the scribbled note passed in a flash that would alert into agents at work. This was their natural habitat, after all.

Bond glanced back up at the stage. The panel seemed a little unusual to him, you didn’t see many of these, after all. There was a middle-aged man in a suit and he was talking to four other middle-aged men in suits. Bond slunk towards a corner, hiding in plain sight, his mind racing. A panel like this sticks out like a sore thumb so it must mean something. But what? Some kind of signal?

The men were all talking about NFC and how it was going to transform the customer experience because tap-and-pay is easy and quick and secure. But this was old news. Bond tried to read between the lines. But all he saw were the lines. 

Part 10: Bitfinger

Back at the casino, Bond decided to take an R&R break at the tables. He had a formula. He needed three things to win. A woman on his arm, a gin and tonic in his hand and a lucky drunk Scotsman at his table.

The woman was walking towards him. “I don’t gamble,” she said.

“I don’t either”, said Bond, “I use a cautious probability-based strategy. It’s called Card Risk Assessment for Blackjack Scenarios, or CRABS for short. Why don’t you come with me and I’ll show my CRABS in action.”

She reached out an elegant hand. “Bailey”. 

“Bond”, he said, taking her arm in his. “James Bond”.

Curious, she walked with him past the slot machines towards the Blackjack games. Bond was looking along the tables to see if Lady Luck might be smiling on him tonight. She was. At the very last table, he heard what he had been hoping for.

“I’ve nae idea whether I’m up or doon, and I dinnae care now I’ve a wee dram or two!”

Perfect. James sat her down and slid in between her and drunk Scotsman. And started winning. His conservative and cautious approach married to aggressive doubling and buying at the right time served them both royally. When they stumbled blinking into the bright lights of the strip three hours later, Bailey 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool was a hundred dollars to the good.

Later that morning, Bond had just settled down for breakfast when he became aware of mounting panic in the crowd around him. People were staring at their iPhones in disbelief, showing their neighbours the news reports!

M.C.X had launched a first strike. President Cook had pressed the red button. All over America the lights were going out. The lights on the contactless terminals, that is. No-one could tap and pay in CVS. Or 7-Eleven. Or Rite Aid.

“The madmen”, Bond said under his breath as he rushed to report this unexpected development back to base. “The madmen. What are they doing?”

The strategy made no sense to him.

“Bows and arrows against the lightning”, he muttered, scanning news feed after news feed.

There was no way that they could take A.P.P.L.E out with that first strike, which meant that A.P.P.L.E’s revenge was guaranteed and certain to be terrible. And indeed it was. A.P.P.L.E’s MX missiles (Media eXclusion missiles) meant that it literally rained bad publicity across the whole of the M.C.X empire. Within a couple of days, it looked all over.

McDonalds, which accepts Apple Pay at its 14,000 restaurants in the United States, said Apple Pay accounted for 50 percent of its tap-to-pay transactions. And Walgreens, the nationwide chain of drugstores, said its mobile wallet payments had doubled since Apple Pay came out.

[From  Killer Apps TV ]

What’s more, under cover of the A.P.P.L.E assault, G.O.O.G.L.E forces were beginning to encroach into M.C.X territory and spies reported that the breakaway republic of T.A.R.G.E.T had already announced that it would allow A.P.P.L.E forces a base in its app.

“App and pay,” Bond reflected, “is more important than tap and pay in the long run. M.C.X might never regain the strategic heights. I don’t understand why they jumbled together their new payment system and their new mobile QR code app.”

Given the panic, Bond decided to lay low for a day or two, so he moved out of the Aria and went off the Paris. His heart sank as he walked through the door. The line to register was an hour long! Bond stood wondering whether to miss the Money2020 Pool Party that he had been looking forward to. Out of nowhere, N. appeared at the head of the queue. Bond noticed him flash a small piece of black plastic at the clerk, and as if by magic a new line was opened, just for N. Even Bond was impressed.

The only card he had with him was that driving licence that S. had given him. He flashed at it the clerk. Nothing. Bond put it away quickly. Odd. It normally worked.

“I wonder if it’s a forgery?” he thought to himself, and began to wonder what might be a quick and efficient way to find out. And then it came to him. Via a connection, Bond sent a message to the Israelis. Back came an invitation: Starbucks at 3pm.

“Good idea”, Bond said to himself. No-one will expect a top secret meeting 

They were there at three on the dot, milling around in the crowd. Bond put his driving licence on the table and took a photo of it, and mailed to the AU10TIX operative opposite.

“Let me know”, Bond whispered, and turned back to his latte.

A couple of hours later the message came through. “It’s real”, they said. “We’ve done detailed image analysis to look for alterations and found none, so we ran data extraction algorithms to get the details. They all match up.” 

Just when Bond was feeling on top of things again, bad news arrived from the boss. “There’s been a security breach”, said G., “and I thought you’d want to know right away”. Bond glanced down at his phone: there was a message from the service, pointing out a tweet that the big data analysis Watson-style supercomputer had picked up earlier:

Prior to meeting  @dgwbirch , I thought all Brits were like James Bond. Mtg him confirmed that. I was wrong?

— rshevlin (@rshevlin)  November 5, 2014

G. was on Wickr in an instant. “Take him out”, she said without a hint of emotion.

Bond was ahead of her. He was already planning an invitation to Shevlin. A meeting at his favourite place in Boston,  Post 390. Clam chowder, the best crab cakes in the city… and a dash of Polonium.

THE END.

Are you looking for:

• A speaker/moderator for your online or in person event?

• Written content or contribution for your publication?

• A trusted advisor for your company’s board?

• Some comment on the latest digital financial services news/media?