The Demand for Stored Value Payment Instruments

Due to their functionality, stored value purses based on smart card technology are prominent candidates for being the dominant medium of exchange for micropayments. However, the overall prospects of these payment systems are yet ambiguous, both from the perspective of practice and monetary theory, because their potential to substitute for cash is still largely unknown. As a contribution to the field, a model is proposed founding the potential utilization of stored value cards in microeconomic calculus. As a result, the model provides insight into the crucial parameters determining usage. Moreover, the model suggests that issuers should maximize demand and profits by offering interest payments or insurance against loss.Electronic Money, Stored Value, Digital Payment Instruments, Monetary Theory, Demand for Money

Mobile banking and financial inclusion: The regulatory lessons

Mobile banking is growing at a remarkable speed around the world. In the process it is creating considerable uncertainty about the appropriate regulatory response to this newly emerging service. This paper sets out a framework for considering the design of regulation of mobile banking. Since it lies at the interface between financial services and telecoms, mobile banking also raises competition policy and interoperability issues that are discussed in the paper. Finally, by unbundling payments services into its component parts, mobile banking provides important lessons for the design of financial regulation more generally in developed as well as developing economies. --Banking,Regulation,Microfinance,Payments System,Mobile Money

Building professional qualifications as a model of integration and transfer of knowledge

The multi-faceted nature of transformations that occur in modern business encourages the evolution of concepts, methods and tools of competitiveness, as a result of which, dynamic changes are seen in the theory and practice of management. Marketing, one of the areas of management, encapsulates these changes. Created at the beginning of the 20th century as an academic field, management is based on adaptability adjustment processes. These should be accompanied by changes in the area of managerial education and their success is defined by knowledge transfer between theory and practice. The long established threefold rigid managerial education market (universities, training and consulting companies and so called Corporate Universities) does not guarantee the effective transfer of knowledge and, therefore, the effectiveness of managerial education. The idea of professional qualifications which draw from science as well as management experience, attempts to bridge that gap. Analysis of the operations of institutios that develop and promote professional qualifications, exemplified by The Chartered Institute of Marketing, proves that they may become, or perhaps already are, an effective mechanism for the integration and transfer of knowledge between the world of theory and management practice.Preparation and printing funded by the National Agency for Research and Development under project “Kreator Innowacyjności – wparcie dla Przedsiębiorczości akademickiej

User Acceptance of Multifunctional Smart Cards

The introduction of smart cards in the Austrian public sector has been discussed since the late 1980s. Public organisations including the national health insurance institute and the national citizen registration office are in the conceptual phase of the introduction. One of the pilot projects was the roll-out of the multifunctional student ID card to the students of the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (WU Vienna) in autumn 2000. To assess the pilot and to gain insight into further projects, it is necessary to investigate the students’ point of view and their acceptance of the WU smart card. Furthermore it would be interesting to gain knowledge about the integration of further functionalities such as payment services or health insurance data. In this paper, which is a co-operation of three departments at the WU Vienna, we want to give a report on the current status of the research project focused on investigating the issues affecting the introduction of new functionalities of the multifunctional student ID card at the WU Vienna. While the research reported here is still at an early stage of analysis, we have already gained significant findings on students’ attitude towards usage of current as well as of potential extended functionalities of the student ID card. The main focus of our research is to gain knowledge about the general students’ acceptance. The data collection was carried out through an online questionnaire and the data analysis was based on a sample of 417 students. Evaluating the findings of the first phase of our research project, we have been able to draw implications for the next stage of our investigation

The 40 Gbps cascaded bit-interleaving PON

A

Analysis of roles and position of mobile network operators in mobile payment infrastructure

A number of different mobile payment solutions have been presented the last decade. The phone subscription with its security mechanisms are used for user identification and payments. This is the case for SMS based payment and ticketing systems that are getting more and more popular. However, there are other ways to implement a Trusted Element (TE) , where a SIM card architecture is only one. It can be in the mobile phone, as a separate integrated circuit, as an optional customer deployed plug-in device (e.g., microSD) or be running as an application on a server existing entirely as software. In this paper we analyze what roles and responsibilities different actors have in different types of mobile payments solutions. The main focus is on the implications for the mobile operator business. It turns out that new types of intermediary actors in most cases play an important role. Sometimes mobile operators are not even involved. The emergence of new payment together with other non-SIM card based TE solutions opens up for many different market scenarios for mobile payment services. --

Individual Risk Management for Digital Payment Systems

Despite existing security standards and security technologies, such as secure hardware, gaps between users’ demand for security and the security offered by a payment system can still remain. These security gaps imply risks for users. In this paper, we introduce a framework for the management of those risks. As a result, we present an instrument enabling users to evaluate eventual risks related with digital payment systems and to handle these risks with technical and economic instruments.Payment Systems, Digital Money