Visa puts weight behind smartcard firm

Visa yesterday gave its backing to a Belgian smartcard technology - Proton - with a view to making it the global standard for electronic purse schemes. It also announced an investment into Proton World International - the company which develops the cards.

Epurse applications load credit onto a chip installed in a card, for use over the Internet or at retail terminals. Proton sells its smartcards to Western Europe, the US, Australia and Brazil.

Visa is developing Common Electronic Purse Specifications (Ceps) based on Proton, and expects 90 per cent of smartcards to adopt the standard once it is released later this year. Colin Baptie, a Visa spokesman, said: "The standard will be ratified by the ECBS - a central banking system - and will be compliant with existing credit and debit card specifications."

But the global standard is not quite in the bag. Mastercard plans to pilot epurse applications on its Mondex MultOS platform at the end of this year, with initial trials taking place in the Central America, Israel and the UK. Gerry Hopkinson, head of Corporate Affairs for Mondex, said: "MultOS is already franchised in 53 countries worldwide. We are the worldwide solution."

Meanwhile, American Express, which already licenses MultOS from Mastercard, yesterday announced that it would join Visa in licensing Proton for epurse applications. An American Express spokeswoman told Silicon News: "We'll work with developers to create a common specification and we'll make our results available to the industry as a whole."