Dear Subscriber,

In today’s newsletter we speak to Token CEO and founder Steve Kirsch about tokenisation, creating new payment paradigms and what the future of money movement looks like. He also talks about the problems in payments and how he went about fixing them.

Elsewhere, the world of mobile payments has had an interesting few days. UBS is helping to galvanise the shift toward cashless society in its home region through its support of Swiss mobile payments service Paymit and across the pond, whilst in Los Angeles, the city’s commuter rail system, Metrolink, has just started trialling mobile payments and ticketing. However, in the UK a BBC investigation has revealed some serious flaws in major banks’ mobile banking services. In other news, spending on contactless cards more than tripled in 2015 to reach £7.75 billion, according to the latest data from The UK Cards Association. To put that in perspective, £2.32 billion was spent using contactless in the whole of 2014, whilst £1.2 billion was spent just in the month of December 2015.

Based in Redwood City, Token is building next generation payment technology with serial entrepreneur Steve Kirsch at the helm. It aims to create a standard protocol or paradigm for exchanging value online: in short a payments infrastructure built for the internet.

Banking heavyweight UBS is helping galvanise the shift toward cashless society in its home region through its support of Swiss mobile payments service Paymit, which is expanding its service to the high street for the first time.

Spending on contactless cards more than tripled in 2015 to reach £7.75 billion, according to the latest data from The UK Cards Association. In 2014, £2.32 billion was spent using contactless. To put it in perspective, £1.2 billion was spent in the month of December alone.

NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland are going to change their security procedures as a direct consequence of an online break-in by BBC journalists who were investigating SIM swap fraud.

Los Angeles’ Metrolink commuter railroad has stepped into the digital age as it launched the first version of its mobile ticketing app, which will allow its riders the option to purchase their ticket on a smartphone, tablet or other mobile device.