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Examines the many innovative smart card applications covering areas such as telecommunications, transport, banking, healthcare and employee/membership schemes. Looks at how the banks, financial services firms, information companies and card issuers are gradually reconceptualizing their delivery strategy as well as their businesses to meet the growing need for remote delivery, brand equity and differentiation. Says that smart cards could act as payment vehicles, access keys, information managers, marketing tools and customized delivery systems. Explores possibilities of an electronic purse range from a disposable stored value card to a re‐loadable stored value card which could literally replace low‐value cash transactions. Smart cards would then become integral to the banks’ concept of remote delivery systems in the future, because smart cards are not just a product, they are a new delivery system. Focuses on some of the issues that might be of deeper concern to banks. Suggests a collaboration between banks and providers in the mass introduction of smart cards.

Smart cards are being toted as the secure means of payment for the future. But there are still some security and legal issues to resolve. This article evaluates current security methods for smart cards and briefly reviews existing legislation related to their use.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.

Explains that the smart card is increasingly being held and used by consumers in the UK, particularly in its electronic purse or loyalty card capacity. The smart card is a plastic card that carries an embedded computer chip with memory and interactive capabilities. Describes the current major payment options open to consumers, and accepted by retailers, with a review of the costs and benefits of each payment option. Considers the electronic purse pilot of Mondex as a new payment option and looks at the issues facing retailers with the introduction of smart cards. Concludes that acceptance of the smart card as a new payment option depends heavily on retailers’ attitudes and these will be formed by the so‐far unquantified balance of costs and benefits that will accompany the introduction of the smart card.

For more than a decade, bankers and others outside the financial services community such as hardware manufacturers have sought to solidify the place of smart card technology as a viable retail point‐of‐sale alternative and, more boldly, as an outright replacement for cash in everyday consumption situations around the globe. Despite strong development efforts and numerous fact‐finding market trials, many banks have found smart card technology to be a losing proposition. This article presents a detailed case study of both consumer and merchant adoption of one smart card‐based retail point‐of‐sale system. The system, called “Exact”, was test marketed for a full year in the Canadian market. Various perceptual and demographic data from consumers as well as firm‐level data from retailers are both presented and assessed. The ensuing discussion offers pragmatic suggestions for those in the financial services community as to how the apparent difficulties and shortcomings of smart card technology may be overcome.

Electronic commerce has been recognised as a source of fundamental change to the conduct of business. Exploitation by business of this innovative approach to payments will necessitate wide‐scale adoption of new processes and technologies and may require new thinking on how organizations adopt innovations. Primarily, these innovations will be interactive and inter‐organizational, i.e. a successful cash substitute will require the concurrent participation of many different organizations, as well as consumers. Current theoretical models of adoption may not cater for this type of innovation. This paper compares four diverse pilot implementations of smart‐card payment systems with Rogers’ (1995) attributes of innovations, adoption processes and adoption decision approaches for organizations. In general, Rogers’ models do not reflect the levels of complexity and diversity found in practice. Extensions of the models are proposed.

The continuously increasing need for de‐centralized information systems offering data to the people who need them irrespective of their physical location, as well as the requirement for exchanging information between different but interoperable systems, make the system’s architectural and functional design more complex and in many cases extremely vulnerable in respect to its security attributes. The concept of a “secure portable information file”, that can nowadays be easily implemented through the available smart card technology, can significantly ease information management and ensure maximum data protection in respect to their integrity, confidentiality and availability. This paper presents the use of smart cards in an educational environment as a case‐study example for demonstrating the above mentioned benefits, focussing on the utilization of the smart card’s cryptographic functions for implementing mechanisms capable of providing an extremely secure operational framework in terms of user and application provider authenticity, management of access privileges and data integrity and confidentiality.

Rapid advances in technology have conferred vast benefits upon modern societies. Money can be transferred by wire in an instant. The internet has dispensed with the need to send faxes across telephone wires. The days when it was necessary to carry multiple currencies across the international borders have all but disappeared. The day is fast approaching when societies will be cashless and people will be able to carry so‐called smart cards that contain all of their funds in the form of electronic cash. Smart cards have the technical ability to facilitate transfers of electronic cash from one smart card to another. Electronic cash can be used to shop on the internet and even gamble there. The shares of a company can be bought and sold on multiple stock exchanges through electronic cash transactions. When a London stock exchange is closed, for example, a person in the UK might transmit electronic cash to New York and buy publicly traded shares because the stock exchanges in New York will be open. If a citizen of one country loses faith in the national currency, he might use an electronic cash transaction to convert his assets into the stronger currency of another country in a foreign bank account. The examples of how modern technology will continue to benefit us are numerous.

Purpose — Fare validation data from transit smart card automatic fare collection (AFC) systems have properties that align with the direction of large-scale mobility surveys and the evermore demanding data needs of the transit industry. In addition to applications in transit planning and service monitoring, travel patterns and behaviour can effectively be studied by exploiting the continuous stream of observations from the same card. The paper proposes a methodology to enrich fare validation data in order to generate information that is hard to obtain with traditional travel surveys.

Methodology/approach — The methodology aims to synthesize individual-level attributes by summarizing multi-day validation records from each card. These new dimensions are then transposed to various levels of aggregation and studied simultaneously in multivariate analysis. The methodology can also be applied to synthesize other multi-day attributes and is transferable to other modes and other travel behaviour studies.

Findings — Results show that validation data can effectively be used to measure the distribution of travel patterns in time and space as well as the variation of those phenomena over time. The paper provides several examples based on millions of validation records from the metro sub-network of Montréal, along with interpretations and some practical implications.

Research limitations/implications — Limitations and bias regarding the data and the methodology as well as the strategies to handle them are discussed within the context of passive travel survey and travel behaviour studies.

Practical implications — Practitioners in transit planning, operations, marketing and modelling can benefit from studying the increasingly accessible and massive smart card datasets through a deeper understanding of multi-day travel patterns and behaviour of transit users.

Originality/value — This paper outlines a data modelling approach and simple-to-implement methodology which exploit the multi-day property of fare validation data from a smart card AFC. The concept of multi-day attributes is introduced. The analyses show that the approach is effective for extracting information on travel behaviour and its variation which would otherwise be hard to obtain through traditional travel surveys, opening up another dimension of this data source for practitioners and transport modellers alike.

Discusses “smart cards” as electronic cash carriers. Examines technological innovations such as the Mondex “electronic purse” in the UK, where card values can be topped up by telephone. Forecasts that in the next few years, physical cash will be replaced as a main medium for transactions by “e‐cash,” which is cheaper to manufacture, more portable, and more versatile.