Ray Van Eng (09/22/97)                  

"Cash and checks will become endangered species."

-- Edmund P. Jensen, President and CEO, Visa International.

With that, the Visa chief highlighted the importance of new payment technology as in smart cards, electronics checks, digital cash and Internet transactions at a roundtable meeting with industry experts and the media in New York City.

Jensen predicted that in five years time, there will be more than one billion Visa cards in use, a third of that will be made "smart" by having computer chips in them.

Visa's own brand of stored value smart card, the Visa Cash is widely deployed by member banks. So far, 21 million of these chip enhanced credit card size devices are offered to consumers in 24 countries in 69 pilot projects.

During the New York conference, Visa and Bank of America demonstrated a live Visa Cash transaction on the Internet, which the companies view as an important step in formulating a secure online payment system.

Another notable introduction is the "Visa Roskart", an off-line chip card designed for places like Russia, Eastern Europe, parts of Asia and Africa where the telecommunication and banking infrastructures are too primitive to handle secure transactions online.

The Roskart system is based on a pre-payment model and is expected to revolutionize the way consumers pay in more than 50 developing countries, with more than 3.2 billion people as potential users.

In the United States, Visa Cash and its main competitor, the Mastercard International backed Mondex stored value card are to be used in an upcoming trial in New York City involving Chase Manhattan Bank, Citibank, Visa and Mastercard during which interoperability tests will be conducted to ensure the two chip cards work in tandem on the same card reader terminal just as different brands of magnetic stripe credit cards are able to today.

In Canada, where Mondex presently enjoys an overwhelming support by all major financial institutions, a Visa Cash trial involving the use of more than 10,000 chip cards will go ahead in Barrie, Ontario.

In Latin America, Visa has a co-branded program with the Macdonald's Restaurant to test the Visa Cash cards.