In message
, at
02:08:00 on Thu, 15 May 2008, Mr Thant
remarked:
On 15 May, 09:39, Roland Perry wrote:
That was part of the plan, but as I understand it the financial rules in
this country would mean that Tfl had to become a "bank" and that was too
much for them.

The official line was they couldn't find a partner (=investor),

But the investment would be needed mainly to qualify as a "bank", I
presume.

which I took to mean the venture was considered unprofitable, which is
what will save us from MIG's future vision.

Most e-cash seems to be "unprofitable", apart from closed systems like
Oyster. There are even in the banking industry those who think that
schemes like "pay-wave" are daft, encouraging lots of very small credit
card transactions.

In the mean time Barclaycard have stepped into the void with their
"onepulse" combined Oyster and pay-wave card. I have yet to see any
pay-wave enabled tills, let alone vending machines, though.

The Oyster section isn't at all linked to the paywave or the Credit
Card parts.

It's linked in the sense that there is an auto top-up facility for a
flow of funds from Credit Card to Oyster; but there's none in the other
direction.

The paywave site has a pretty pathetic map of retailers:
http://www.visapaywave.co.uk/

Thanks. (Although it's a ghasty over-flashed site, and the mapping is
very hard to use, and slow; you need to realise that several of the
categories are "zero".)
--
Roland Perry