Kealan Lennon is sitting at a breakfast table in China with the then enterprise minister Richard Bruton and the head of corporate development with Tencent, the $920 billion multinational technology conglomerate. Bruton is leading the Chinese trade mission and is extolling the virtues of CleverCards, Lennon’s digital greeting cards platform. However, Lennon’s mind is elsewhere. For the past three days, he had not seen anyone use a credit card or a debit card, never mind cash. Instead, everyone was using their phone to pay for all transactions. His company had developed the platform that allowed customers to send greeting cards…

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