The MAOSCO Consortium now has a quorum of industry support capable of shaping the future direction of smart card technology, according to a new report from London-based Ovum Ltd. The report points to the recent backing given to MAOSCO by Fujitsu Ltd and its ICL and Amdahl satellites as a signal that applications are now driving demand (CI No 3,465). Applications need standard operating system layers such as MAOSCO’s Multos or Sun Microsystems Inc’s Java Card, if they are not to be custom built for each individual system. And while both platforms have similar aims, they are not interoperable and will have different evolutions. MAOSCO is a not-for-profit consortium formed to put its weight behind Multos, an operating system layer contributed for free by Mondex International Inc in the hope it would become a standard. Ovum believes that the main competitor to Multos – Java Card – will not be mature enough, and smart card hardware will not be powerful enough to run it, before 2001. That gives Multos a full three years to get established. It calculates that by 2003 the smart card application development market will be worth $704m. Applications won’t need to come from the card issuer, and multiple applications will be able to be loaded onto cards, and unloaded again, by cardholders. Because of this, Ovum believes a $2.7bn card management services industry will also have grown up by 2003. By then, annual unit sales of smart cards will have risen to 2.7 billion units, it says. The lead author of the report, Duncan Brow, predicts that financial applications, which led to the earlier adoption of smart cards in Europe, will not be the same driver in the US, where smart cards have yet to take off. Predictions for the US have been greatly overstated in the past three years. The smart card market will not grow on the back of financial applications such as pre-payment and e-cash but on internet access. The diversity and number of players in the US financial arena is staggering – and smart card adoption will require a degree of interworking he says. The recent Proton World International announcement, which won support from Visa International and American Express (CI No 3,463) concerns just a single brand of e-cash application, says the report’s co- author, Mark Stevenson. American Express has said it will be implementing the Proton application on top of Multos, while Mastercard International, also supporting Multos, has committed to the Mondex e-cash application and won’t use Proton. But, says Stevenson, Mondex and Proton are not analogous. Mondex truly is cash, whereas Proton is similar to VisaCash products – a sort of pre-authorized debit card.
