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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to design, implement and evaluate the usage of the password-authenticated secure channel protocol SRP to protect the communication of a mobile application to a Java Card applet. The usage of security and privacy sensitive systems on mobile devices, such as mobile banking, mobile credit cards, mobile ticketing or mobile digital identities has continuously risen in recent years. This development makes the protection of personal and security sensitive data on mobile devices more important than ever.

A common approach for the protection of sensitive data is to use additional hardware such as smart cards or secure elements. The communication between such dedicated hardware and back-end management systems uses strong cryptography. However, the data transfer between applications on the mobile device and so-called applets on the dedicated hardware is often either unencrypted (and interceptable by malicious software) or encrypted with static keys stored in applications.

To address this issue, this paper presents a solution for fine-grained secure application-to-applet communication based on Secure Remote Password (SRP-6a and SRP-5), an authenticated key agreement protocol, with a user-provided password at run-time.

By exploiting the Java Card cryptographic application programming interfaces (APIs) and minor adaptations to the protocol, which do not affect the security, the authors were able to implement this scheme on Java Cards with reasonable computation time.

Imagine books the size of credit cards — to read them all you need to do is put the card in a portable book‐sized reader. This is the concept behind the Smart Book which has been developed and tested in Australia over the last few years. The companies behind the joint venture are James Hardie Industries Limited, one of the top fifty public companies in Australia, Weldon International, one of Australia's larger book publishers, and Megaword International Pty Limited, the originator of the product concept

Reviews the payment environment and “proliferation” of new payment services on the market. Highlights the cost reduction benefits to financial institutions of cash replacement. Defines the scope of digital money as encompassing both electronic purse money and software money. The fundamental differences in basic philosophy, design principles and technical choices of the variety of approaches to electronic cash are evaluated. Three key directions are identified to accelerate the take‐up of digital money. Urges that the regulatory regime necessary to ensure financial integrity of non‐bank issuers is developed without stifling innovation and competition or consumer confidence. EU commission directives and the findings of a multinational alliance of banking institutions are reviewed and recommendations given for new electronic purse products. Pinpoints several useful lessons which have been learnt from electronic purse experiences to date.