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E-Money As CASH, Switzerland Says. An Electronic purse

Ray Van Eng (02/17/97) Switzerland is joining the march of many European nations in moving forward to put an electronic money system in place. But the Swiss simply think that e-money is just CASH, and a smart one at that. Let me explain. CASH is built on an electronic purse system, Proton, developed by Banksys, a unit of Belgian Bank. The Swiss National Bank (SNB) chooses the Proton over other competing system such as the UK's Mondex, Denmark's Danmont and Portugal's Sibs, all vying to establish itself as a global standard for e-money. Besides Switzerland, the Proton system will also be used in Begium and the Netherlands this year and is in use in eight other countries around the world. American Express has also licensed the technology to be used in future products. CASH is essentially a reloadable smart card that can be used to store up to 300 swiss francs from automated teller machines and is intended for transactions under 25 francs for transportation, parking, gas stations etc. Initially, 5000 merchants will accept the CASH card. The plan is to enable about a third or 50,000 retail outlets out of a total of 150,000 throughout the nation to join the program by the year 2001. The SNB will manage the central pool of money needed to make the CASH system work. When consumers download money to their CASH cards, real "cash" is moved into the pool, or float, and an equivalent amount e-cash is created for the individuals. When eventually the retailers got the e-cash and "deposit" that into their bank accounts, the appropriate amount of real "cash" is transferred from the pool to the right accounts and a matching amount of e-cash will then be destroyed to keep everything in balance. E-Mail

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