ragingbull.com
By: SPIN
Reply To: None Sunday, 5 Mar 2000 at 7:47 PM EST
Post # of 152122
Mondex: 'Banks Not Critical For Success'
Smart Card Central
Dec 17 1999 : Mondex CEO, Michael Keegan, has acknowledged eCash to be "a very tough business case for banks" in necessitating a new infrastructure, a process capable of "defeating the economics of issuance". As a result, he concludes the market to be consumer- and service provider-driven, not bank-driven. Mondex is accordingly pushing its business case through card readers within PCs, set-top boxes and cell phones. The firm is similarly betting on retail implementations such as the Norwegian lottery system.
Keegan seems to say that banks have moved w/feet of clay & have been reluctant to embrace new tech because of cost/benefit concerns. as such, they have chosen an "end around" by going through CONTENT via pcs, etc. lottery? norwegian? isn't KISS a player in Scandanavia? Imagine the popularity of a lottery smart card in the US, w/kiosks?!?
Despite having 2 million chip-enabled cards in circulation, as opposed to Visa's 23 million, Mondex is admired for its industry track record. Keegan is still encouraging banks to admit failure in pushing the concept to the retail market. For example, a non-banking entity, Wave Systems, is participating in Cyber-COMM, a new Internet transaction system in France involving the use of SET and smart card readers.
Mondex is a comer. Visa remains king. Keegan is using rhetoric to add to public demand for card technologies and point out to banking that the infrastructure would be a capital investment worth making. he used WAVE as an example of forward-looking "early adopters" as an indication that the time has come to embrace such technology calling it an Internet transaction system (nice & succinct ;-)
In Keegan's view, the future of Mondex resides in the provision of e-cash through service providers, a necessary tangent to attract widespread support from banks. Going forward, Keegan is confident that the market is sufficiently large to accommodate both CEPS and Mondex products. Rather than having to reissue hunderds of millions of smart cards before 2002, as issuers of CEPS cards will have to do, Mondex is looking to its card-to-card functions for a unique selling point.
Mondex is maximizing its effort w/various services (IMO CONTENT) to get a significant enough share to justify eventual UBIQUITY. Keegan says the market is wide open. as to CEPS & card-to-card functions, i'll pass. Chooch? BigTim? DWG?
Related Links
French e-Purse Pilots Threaten Mondex
Will MULTOS Split From Mondex?
Major Banks in Mexico License Mondex
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all IMO, of course.
SPIN |
