By Felicity Ussher, 5 November 1998 00:25
NEWS The prospect of a universal smartcard operating system has been smashed after the collapse of the largest smartcard pilot so far. The smartcard industry has abandoned its one attempt at cooperation, following negative feedback from shop owners in a New York trial. Retailers said the payment system - which supported both Visa Cash and MasterCard Mondex - was too complicated to use. Visa and MasterCard - arch rivals in the electronic commerce arena - lack a common standard, but the New York pilot was an attempt to run the two systems together, to increase their reach. Chase Manhattan issued Mondex cards to local residents a year ago, and Citibank issued Visa Cash cards to the same area, in Upper West Side New York. The big question was whether merchants would be happy to process transactions twice, using a single card reader. The answer was a resolute no, and the trial will be abandoned at the end of the year. In future, Visa will concentrate on pushing its own standards - and will ignore Mondex altogether. Greg Jones, director of corporate relations at Visa US, told Silicon.com: "We concluded that in the longer term, an interoperable system is not viable, due to merchant settlement difficulties. From now on we will concentrate on developing a global standard so that transactions from any smartcard can be settled with a single reader." Visa hopes to publish specifications for the Common Electronic Purse Specification (Ceps) before the end of the year. Ceps is supported by Europay, Proton and other card developers - but not by Mastercard. Mondex was not available to comment on its future plans.
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