Verifone 'SET' To Kick-Start Internet Commerce
Ray Van Eng (06/24/96)
Verifone (http://www.verifone.com), a leading provider of Transaction Automation
solutions to enable electronic payment between merchants, financial institutions
and the consumer is about to introduce an Internet based electronic commerce
solution aimed at kick-starting the market.
The strategy that Verifone takes is a simple one. Verifone is to build on an emerging credit card payment standard, a protocol known as the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) put forth by VISA and MasterCard and has the support of practically every major and minor vendors in the electronic commerce business.
Initially, the Verifone implementation will only support the link between merchants, Internet technology providers and the financial institutions. The consumer would typically use a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) enabled browsers to purchase items from a merchant's web site. With the help of SSL, encrypted financial data from the consumer will travel over the Internet to the merchant's web server. From that point on, the communication between the merchant and the financial institution is done with the SET protocol. The financial institution would reply to the merchant with an authorization code sent via SET and the merchant would then issue a digital receipt to the consumer using SSL.
For the implementation of SET in the consumer to merchant link, Verifone is counting on a wide-spread adoption of consumer digital credentials (certificates and key pairs) and SET-compliant consumer software such as electronic wallets, consumer shopping utilities that Netscape, Microsoft, CyberCash and others are formulating.
Eventually, Verifone sees that the SET protocol will supplant the SSL link, forming a complete SET compliant connection right from the consumer's desktop PC to the merchant's web server to the credit card authorization company's computer and then all the way back to the consumer.
To achieve this goal, Verifone is working on an integrated system that consists of three different components - vGATE, vPOS, and vWALLET. vGATE is a piece of gateway software that will allow a financial institution to accept transactions from merchants over the Internet without altering the existing host financial system.
vPOS is a point of sale application on the merchant's web server that acts as a go-between for the financial institution's vGATE and the consumer's browser. vPOS will support authorization, capture, payment and other functions. vWALLET is Verifone's own consumer electronic wallet application for storing such information as credit card numbers, shipping and billing addresses, digital signatures and certificates, encryption key pairs and other forms of Internet payment schemes such as electronic cash and smart cards.
In a recent press conference in San Francisco, many of the world's leading electronic commerce companies including VISA, MasterCard, Open Market, Oracle, Microsoft, O'Reilly, RSA Data, AT&T, NOVUS Services, Royal Bank of Canada, Wells Fargo Bank etc. have all pledged support for the Verifone approach as a quick way to deploy a SET compliant software in the electronic commerce marketplace.
As Roger B. Bertman, vice president and general manager of VeriFone's Internet Commerce Division indicated at the press conference, "This will help the industry benefit more quickly from increased Internet transaction volumes and allow us to all begin `learning by doing."