With the vision of billions of dollars worth of electronic commerce

via the Internet dancing in their heads, merchants eagerly

anticipate the last building block of e-Business to drop into

place: a consumer-credible means of conducting totally secure

payment card transactions over open networks.

On December 30, that long-awaited breakthrough may well have

occurred. MasterCard, IBM, and Danish Payment Systems

orchestrated the first end-to-end Internet transaction using the

Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol -- the most secure

method yet devised for processing Internet credit card

transactions. During January, nearly 1,000 consumers in

Denmark are using their Eurocard-MasterCard cards to make

purchases via the Internet on a pilot basis. The pilot

implementation uses IBM's CommercePoint payment software, a

suite of applications supporting the entire payment process.

In April, Fuji Bank of Japan was the first company to use the SET

security protocol for an online debit card transaction.

Fuji Bank's cyberbanking pilot, which is the world's largest Internet debit card

project, is scheduled to roll out throughout this year and next, with a goal of eaching

approximately 100,000 Fuji Bank customers in Japan and throughout the world. The

pilot uses the complete suite of IBM's CommercePOINT Payment software.

IBM has other pilots underway in the Netherlands, Japan, and Hong Kong.

The SET protocol, agreed upon by both MasterCard and Visa and developed with

IBM and several other information technology vendors, is an open, multi-party

standard that can be used worldwide. It offers consumers and vendors, for the

firsttime, the availability, accessibility, convenience and choice that have

constrained retail electronic commerce to this point.

IBM and MasterCard International have established a worldwide joint marketing

alliance to develop markets for secure credit card payments over the Internet and

other public networks. Soon, MasterCard members around the world will have the

opportunity to pilot CommercePOINT, IBM's powerful end-to-end network payment

solution to create a secure environment for their customers to conduct credit card

transactions over the Internet.

The rollout with MasterCard marks the latest in a series of IBM initiatives to evelop

SET-based transactions over networks. With global electronic commerce revenues

estimated to exceed $150 billion by the year 2000 within the U. S. alone, the stakes

are immense.

(Tratto da informazioni IBM)