Proton World International, the company spun off into a separate smart card venture by Belgium electronic payment consortium Banksys, has won investment backing from American Express and Visa International. Along with Banksys itself and Australian company ERG Card Systems Ltd, American Express and Visa have become shareholders in the company and will promote Proton’s electronic purse application. Around 30 million Proton compliant smart cards are in circulation worldwide, and can be used in 200,000 terminals in 15 countries. Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland all have national roll-outs of Proton electronic purse cards underway. Proton says it will support and implement the Common Electronic Purse Specifications currently being defined by a working group of electronic purse operators, and will support Sun Microsystems Inc’s Java as an applications programming interface. Visa’s Open Platform specification, along with other specs for smart card development, will be supported as well. American Express said the deal isn’t exclusive: it is also working with the Multos operating system, originally developed by Mondex International, but passed on to an eight-strong consortium of silicon manufacturers and card vendors last year including Mastercard International and Gemplus SA (CI No 3,162). But Amex hopes to meld the two systems together. We will be working to implement Proton on Multos to further the goal of interoperability, said Peter Godfrey, president of American Express Europe. Banksys is a consortium of some 60 European banks.
á
