Australian smart card and e-commerce company Keycorp is pushing into overseas markets with the first of a new family of Internet-enabled Electronic Funds Transfer at Point of Sale (EFTPOS) merchant terminals, called the K23.
Keycorp is first pushing the K23 to the Chinese and US markets, as the
uptake in these countries is higher than in Australia. The company is also working with national telecommunications carrier Telstra to increase the domestic uptake of smart card technology, with reloadable ‘e-cash’ smart cards that can be used with its terminals.
The K23 supports current debit and credit cards as well as chip-enabled
smart cards, in a bid to boost merchant support of the emerging technology.
The K23 is based on a Microsoft Windows CE operating system and uses TCP/IP to process transactions via Keycorp’s Nobil Internet payment gateway.
This gateway works similarly to the concept behind Secure Electronic
Transactions (SET), in that the customer transacts directly with a third
party financial institution and not with the merchant. In this case, the
gateway creates a bank-branded virtual payment terminal which mirrors the conventional merchant payment terminal.
The K23’s architecture includes expandable Secure Access Models (SAMs) that
provide support for multi-application smart card schemes.
Among these is
the MULTOS standard that has the backing of MasterCard, American Express
and Europay; the Operating System for Smartcard Applications, which
supports GSM SIM cards applications; and the Java Card Forum, with which
Visa is aligned.
