Mondex fights back over Visa allegations

Mondex has slammed allegations from Visa that the collapse of their joint smartcard trial in New York last week means that rival smartcards will never work together.

Mondex's head of Corporate Affairs, Gerry Hopkinson, said: "Visa is trying to get us to join its little gang, who are all developing a smartcard together. But the market can support multiple products, and sooner or later, Visa will be forced to put its product on a smartcard reader alongside its rivals."

The New York project attempted to run Visa Cash alongside Mondex, which was originally developed by MasterCard. But users complained the dual payment system was too complicated to run. As a result, Visa's director of corporate relations, Greg Jones, ruled out working with Mondex in the future, unless Mondex joins Visa's Ceps (Common Electronic Purse Standard) consortium.

Hopkinson told Silicon.com it was highly unlikely that Mondex would ever join the Ceps alliance, as it has already invested in its own product. Mondex's explanation for the New York failure was that the software, rather than the principle, was at fault.

Visa International was unavailable for comment at the time of publishing.