Posted by Charleston Voice, 05.14.12
The method of payment should not be the focus. The real question will be the unit value of the individual MintChips. Will there be any restrictive backing to them? Will the central banks (World bank?) issue them as just another form of fiat? Yes. The banking cartel will not push their chairs back from the dinner table voluntarily w/o force.
Mint Director's Conference participants look to future
The future of currency, physical and digital, consumed much of the discussion time during the 27th Mint Director’s Conference conducted May 7 and 8 in Austria.
The conference, hosted by the Austrian Mint in Vienna, was an industry gathering for officials from the mints that strike coins, the central banks that issue them, and the equipment manufacturers and material providers employed in the process.
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Also participating were affiliated parties including some of the dealers and distributors that channel the coins to customers.
The theme of the conference was “Tradition meets innovation,” but it may well have been “remaining relevant in a digital age,” based on the presentations and discussions that resulted.
“Coins will not go away in our lifetime,” said Jin Roy Ryu, chairman and CEO of Poongsan Group, the South Korean conglomerate that produces coinage strip and ammunition, during the gala dinner May 8, an event sponsored by Poongsan. “That’s a problem for future generations to worry about.”
Others in attendance at the conference aren’t so sure about that timetable, and the diminishing demand for coinage — and ways to forestall it — was on the minds of the estimated 350 or so attendees, many of whom rely for their livelihood on coinage playing a vital role in commerce.
Gerhard Starsich, director general of the Austrian Mint, said that he is “strongly convinced that [multiple] ways of payment will continue to coexist but mints will have to deliver improvements in technology development, security features, improvements in processing and distributing coins and manufacturing coins. But we also have to improve our skills and efforts at marketing — in the global market, now we have to market our product as everyone else does.”
Leading the challenge, experts agreed, are the myriad digital payment systems that are meant to ease transactions and smooth the barriers of commerce, especially when smaller payment amounts are involved.
Digital payment systems
One of the latest initiatives, dubbed MintChip, is from the Royal Canadian Mint.
J. Marc Brûlé, vice president of finance and administration and CFO of the RCM, outlined the growth of the project, noting that by 2015 an estimated two-thirds of Internet users will be located in developing markets and 80 percent of their Internet connections will be made through mobile phones.
MintChip “can be as private as cash, can be person-to-person,” Brûlé said. Users would load data onto a chip, a USB card, a computer, tablet, into the “cloud” or “maybe some future device that doesn’t even exist yet.”
No age restrictions would hamper users and no bank account would be needed (for more about MintChip, see related story on page 5).
MintChip’s main benefit would be for smaller transactions, especially those under $1 (nanotransactions), Brûlé said. It can be a cost effective tool for transactions of that type, he said.
MintChip is “mobile commerce meets social commerce. ... Money as we know it today is fine, but tomorrow is another story,” he said.
Carmen Whateley, managing executive of financial services at the South African mobile phone company Vodacom, sees a similar future.
Vodacom has developed its own mobile payment system, named M-Pesa, allowing users to accept or transfer money through their mobile phone; one’s phone number in essence becomes the user’s bank account.
Users do not need to be Vodacom customers to establish an M-Pesa account, but money always has to be in the account for it to remain open.
“New doesn’t displace the old, it’s an evolution, not a revolution, it’s additive rather than displacive. ... Cash is not necessarily going to be replaced, it’s going to be enhanced,” Whateley said.
Collector coin challenges
With circulation coinage generating less and less activity and profit, as digital payments diminish coinage demand, collector coins are going to be an increasingly important segment for world mints, many participants at the conference said.
Rodolphe Krempp of the Monnaie de Paris (the French Mint) explained how the mint has helped develop a collector market in France for precious metal silver and gold coins at face value over the past few years, thus establishing a new market.
The French Mint’s offerings of this kind have also generated a new wave of collector that the mint was not previously reaching.
Ivor Masters of New Zealand Post also spoke about reaching new collectors with novel approaches, in this case relying upon the ties between stamp and coin collectors.
Coin collectors, who he described as being different from stamp collectors, have very similar psychographic and demographic qualities to stamp collectors, he acknowledged... Read more @Source
