Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II
W3C convened recently for its annual big meeting (called TPAC) in Lisbon, Portugal. This incredible venue – its history, architecture, art, people, food, weather – provided a fitting backdrop for the serious topics under discussion by the over 500 participants. This larger meeting included the seventh face to face meeting for the Web Payments Interest Group, whose primary activity is to identify standardization opportunities for W3C in the area of Web Payments.
In pursuing this goal, the IG discussed topics ready for current approval, topics that need further work, ideas that might form part of future work, and topics relevant to making sure the Web Payments fits into the larger payments environment.
Highlights of the meeting included were the following sessions:
Digital Offers – Joerg Heuer, Deutsche Telekom AG
Joerg summarized the mission of the Digital Offers Task Force: to build community around the topic of improving the Web for digital offers, including loyalty, coupons, rewards, points, and vouchers. The Task Force plans to launch a Community Group in October to identify industry challenges and how Web standards could help address them.
Verifiable Claims – Manu Sporny, Digital Bazaar
A Verifiable Claims Task Force (between the IG and the Credentials Community Group) has been building consensus around a charter for a Working Group to make expressing, exchanging, and verifying claims easier and more secure on the Web. The next steps for this project will be for the W3C management to review the revised charter and other materials, and to decide when and how to propose the charter to the W3C Membership for review. To help resolve some of the remaining questions, the IG met in joint session with the Web Application Security WG on Friday; the opportunity to have such meetings between groups is one of the best things about TPAC!
Payments Accessibility – Katie Halitos-Shea, Knowbility and Shane McCarron, Spec-Ops
Ensuring the Web is accessible for everyone is a key objective of all W3C work. This presentation gave strategies for addressing physical and mental challenges faced by end users when interacting with payment applications. Please watch this space for future blog posts on this important subject.
Paid Content – Andrew Betts, Financial Times and W3C TAG member
As the web matures, users are increasingly willing to pay for quality content. Advertising revenue for conventional publishing is also in decline. Consequently, the ability to sell content efficiently is increasingly important to sustain expensively produced content such as investigative journalism. Andrew Betts discussed the challenge of “paid content” and its potential relationship to Web payments. Following the discussion, Andrew launched the Paid Content Community Group to promote support for paid content on the web, including examining better mechanisms for discovery, pricing, transactions, storage and access control.
Interledger Protocol – Stefan Thomas and Evan Schwartz, Ripple
The team from Ripple explained new developments from the ILP Community Group. ILP is designed to provide a better, more scalable and consistent way to make it easy for any party to pay any other party across disparate payment systems.
Payments in China – organized by Angel Li
- Alibaba – presentation on “Alipay” by Dapeng Liu
- Tencent – presentation on “WeChat Pay” by Chao Guo and Crest Xu
- Baidu – presentation on “Baidu Wallet” by Haibin Huang
- Qihoo 360 – presentation on “360Pay” by Sonfeng Li
While all of these payment systems have differing features, they are all focused on integrating with the lifestyle requirements of the world’s largest consumer marketplace.
Blockchains – Marta Piekarska, Blockstream
Blockchains continue to be a topic of great interest for payments communities, and interfacing them for use on the Web is an important on-going topic. Marta helped the IG understand how thinking has evolved since the “W3C Blockchains and the Web Workshop” in June, and helped the group understand possible next steps in the blockchains discussions.
Coordination with ISO Payments – William Vanobberghen, Groupement des Cartes Bancaires
During this session, the IG got a review of the technologies relevant to Web Payments (such as CAPE and ATICA versions of ISO20022), as well as the all-important human relationship aspects affecting how this technology relates to W3C work. The liaison status between W3C and ISO payments continues to improve, and the group discussed how to maintain this kind of progress.
Regulatory Landscape – Jean-Yves Rossi, Canton Consulting
Every implementer of any Web Payments technology will be faced with regulatory requirements in effect both at the client and the server location for any transaction. Jean-Yves helped the IG understand how they can help implementers by working together to provide descriptions of regional regulatory requirements.
In summary, the Web Payments Interest Group continues to survey the payments landscape for opportunities for standardization on the Web. Payments in general is evolving rapidly, and this IG meeting provided a valuable snap-shot of the requirements and possibilities that continue to make Web Payments an exciting and beneficial activity for W3C.