Blog
Scary times ahead, indeed!
What is particularly scary is the sheer number and value of transactions being processed today.
August 7, 2015 by Richard Buckle — Founder and CEO, Pyalla Technologies, LLC
Reading the headlines that adorn the home page of this site it was hard to miss these:
A Greek tragedy: 'The death of cash'
Legal tender? Time to reexamine the cost of cash
ATMs, electronic benefits ... and the long arm of the law
Follow? The death of cash, the cost of cash and laws limiting access to cash. Quite scary, all things considered.
The good news is that cash is still very prominently featured in most posts, however you could be forgiven for thinking that the bells have started to toll over the demise of a once proud underpinning of all of commerce everywhere.
Fortunately this is not the case. I have just returned from a three-week road trip that took in user events in Dallas; a series of investor meetings in Las Vegas and Simi Valley, California; roundtable sessions with product managers at HP and WebAction; and even a long lunch with the CEO of payments solutions vendor, OmniPayments Inc.
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Richard thinking scary thoughts |
And speaking of Scary — who knew I'd come across the oversize play toys of children's book author, Richard Scarry (and yes, to take a ride, you needed cash). But even with the difference in spelling, I couldn't help but have the picture taken of Richard thinking scary thoughts in a Richard Scarry apple — life imitating art.
The reality is that for the duration of this most recent road trip I needed cash — and not just for the slot machines in Vegas, although they proved a necessary distraction between meetings — but for the shoeshine provider I ran into more than once. And again, cash for tips at coffee stations along America's byways; cash only at remote Texas smokehouse BBQ for brisket and sausage; cash to have a plug inserted into a tire that had picked up a nail.
But many of the former needs for cash have begun to disappear: Toll roads today are being updated to include license plate photo-taking (and subsequent billing) and even the local gas station air-and-vacuum station now takes a credit card.
Again, scary just how much plastic has taken over from cash for even the most mundane of tasks!
Immediately following the road trip I participated in a sales kickoff event timed for the start of the new financial year at one of better independent payments solutions monitoring vendors, IR. Their product, Prognosis, is installed on half the world's HP NonStop systems and it was only a year or so ago that payments solution giant, ACI Worldwide, completed a partnership agreement with IR for Prognosis deployment across the majority of their product suite.
All good news for IR, of course, but still one that required a considerable amount of IR resources when it came to execution. Nevertheless, gaining such a strong foothold in payments as they have, IR is clearly the 800-pound gorilla in the room when it comes to NonStop customers looking to monitor all that's going on across their ATM network.
What was really scary for me was just how old my ideas about monitoring had become. Pictures of giant flight decks of monitors, such as we associate with the Apollo space program from decades ago, continue to come to mind whenever financial institutions discuss their monitoring requirements.
I assume that some of these installations still exist, but with data centers operating in dark, lights-out caverns, management staff for operations and systems can be dispersed all over the globe. And generating a business critical alert on a mobile phone has become every bit as powerful as a series of flashing red indicators across an array of terminal screens.
No, according to the IR brain trust, we have seen a trending away from simply displaying real-time and historical events and data on-screen to providing true business insight.
As I recently wrote in a post to the WebAction blog, the answer to the question, "Show me what just happened," is being enriched by "Why did that just happen?" and even "What might have happened?"
From visibility to insight to predicting to self-healing, monitoring of payments is undergoing quite the transformation as solutions begin to leverage not only developments in mobility but also big data and even clouds.
What is particularly scary from my perspective is not that I was a tad ignorant of events in the world of monitoring, but rather the sheer number and value of transactions being processed today.
According to an HP strategist attending the same sales kickoff at IR, $3.6 trillion-plus in credit, debit and ATM card traffic passes through NonStop systems alone each year, including multichannel retail, wholesale, and mobile payments processing.
Big scary numbers — and yet, there's still so much cash involved here; the distributing of cash remains a major portion of transactions processed on these NonStop systems.
Death of cash! Cost of cash! Limiting cash! How easy it is to make assumptions that the bells we hear ringing are for those banknotes we so regularly depend upon. But in these particularly unstable times, cash is still the great equalizer — whether it's a natural disaster, infrastructure crippled by a hacker or even an unscheduled business trip to unfamiliar places — access to cash simply helps smooth out any wrinkles that might develop.
It's true, as IR CEO, Darc Rasmussen, suggested, "The most important asset in business is customers and without customers, there's no business." And what do our customers all want? Their cash … and NOW! There's nothing scary about that.
About Richard Buckle
Richard Buckle is the founder and CEO of Pyalla Technologies, LLC. He has enjoyed a long association with the Information Technology (IT) industry as a user, vendor, and more recently, as an industry commentator, thought leader, columnist and blogger. Richard participates in the HPE VIP Community where he is part of their influencer team.
