NYPAY and Consult Hyperion are pleased to announce the first NY Digital Money Unconference for 11th September 2012 in Manhattan at Google offices: 111 8^th Avenue (between 15^th and 16^th).

The event will be an “unconference”: that is, instead of a succession of pre-determined Powerpoint presentations, it will mix stimulating talks from industry observers with discussion sessions selected by the attendees themselves on the day. The goal will be for finance, payments and related industry professionals to explore the future of retail electronic payments.

We don’t know what the attendees will choose to discuss the, but choices could be topics such as migration to chip cards in the US, mobile wallets, alternative and parallel currencies, merchants-bank-payment network cooperation, and much more. At a similar event in London earlier this year (the BarCampBank) topics ranged from bank APIs to writing a movie about payments; at the San Francisco unMoney Convergence in February topics included community currencies and micro-credit.

There will be a range of attendees from different backgrounds and we hope the cross-fertilisation will be something special.

Taking part in the discussions will be (amongst many others)

·      Brett King, author of "Bank 2.0" and one of the founders of Movenbank

·      Dave Birch, a Director of Consult Hyperion and Chair of London's annual Digital Money Forum

·      James Anderson, Senior VP Mobile, MasterCard

·      Steve Mott, BetterBuyDesign

·      Duncan Goldie-Scot, Board Member, Microfinance Club of NY

·      Alberto Jimenez, Director of Global Mobile Solutions, Citi

·      Marc Hochstein, Executive Editor of American Banker

·      Deborah Baxley, Principal at Capgemini

The day will begin with Wired contributing editor David Wolman reading from his book "The End of Money" (currently one of Amazon's "top 10" non-fiction books of the year) followed by an on-stage interview and Q&A session to set the scene. After that the attendees will (in best open-space style, as described at http://www.unconference.net/) note the topics that they would like to discuss and these will be organised into four sets of parallel sessions (two before lunch and two after). Attendees are then free to join in any, all or none of the discussions. The points raised in the discussions will be captured and reported.

If you are responsible for strategic directions around payments, banking and finance then come along and get new ideas, new perspectives and new insights to help you to develop robust strategies to make the most of the incredible technology, business and social changes underway. And in this case there is a free lunch plus a complimentary copy of "Tomorrow's Transactions: The 2012 Reader".