The two credit card majors, MasterCard International Inc and Visa International have settled their differences and agreed on a single technical standard for securing card purchases over open networks such as the Internet. The SET Secure Electronic Transactions specification will be detailed this month – the two plan to publish the guideline on their World Wide Web sites in mid-February, and following a comment period, the joint specification should be ready for testing next quarter, so that banks should be able to offer secure bank card services via the Internet to their cardholders in the fourth quarter. Basis of Secure Electronic Transactions is specially developed encryption technology from RSA Data Security Inc, Redwood Shores, California. Participants in the effort include IBM Corp, Microsoft Corp, Netscape Communications Corp, GTE Corp, Terisa Sytems Inc and Verisign Inc. Visa originally teamed with Microsoft and MasterCard with Netscape: they finally got together last summer but talks broke down when MasterCard and Netscape accused Visa and Microsoft of creating a data specification that would require royalty payments to them. It will now be a free specification.
