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Gold/Mining/Energy : Aastra Technologies - telephony, e-cash, mini-ATM -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jean-Robert Grenier who wrote (105)	5/17/1999 11:45:00 PM
From: sPD	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 233

News on Mondex from today's Financial Post (IT Monthly section) "Stay at home and count your coins" TRIAL #2 IN QUEBEC By KIRA VERMOND No more fishing around in pockets for coins for some Sherbrooke, Que., residents this summer. Instead, participants in a new and improved Mender Canada e-cash pilot project will be able to withdraw money from their bank accounts and deposit it on their smart card using minibanking machines that hook right into their telephones. Users can also transfer money from, say, 50c to $500 -- to other Mondex cards without ever involving the bank. If a mother wants to give her daughter $20 to go see a movie, for example, she can slide the cards into the miniautomated teller machine (ATM) and move the money over to her daughter's card. "Electronic cash is really the next step to replacing the actual currency in your wallet," says Alan Brett, chief financial officer of Aastra Technologies Ltd., the company that designed the device. The card keeps digitally encrypted cash on a chip, much like a pay phone card, and is primarily intended for smaller purchases, such as a cup of coffee or paying a parking meter. After completing the first pilot project in Guelph, Ont., which lasted 21 months, the Mondex system is now moving into Quebec with the help of Royal Bank of Canada, Le Mouvement des Caisses Desjardins and Aastra Technologies. But after the spotty results of the Guelph project - financial institutions initially supporting the project eventually backed out after 18 months - many area businesses complained the cards just weren't popular enough to continue using them, and some Guelph residents were hopping mad that refurbished Mender parking meters were left behind when the banks rolled out of the city. Will Sherbrooke residents say, "oui" to e-cash? Yes, says Paul Bimm, senior manager of smart card implementation for Royal Bank -- but only once modifications to the original system are made. After all, Guelph residents did spend $d-million under the Mondex system, nearly three times the amount the banks say they had expected. Under the old pilot project, one of the main headaches Guelph users said they encountered was, to use e-cash, they had to carry around yet another card bulking up their wallets. The solution ? Design one cad that combines debit, ATM and electronic cash. "Now they have that one card, and that's one of the things they told us … loud and clear: Mr Bimm says. And because the cards use a computer chip instead of a magnetic strip that current ATM cards use, the cards' memory capacity can be increased as technology moves forward. The cards handled in Guelph, for example, had only eight kilobytes of memory, but those designed for Sherbrooke will have 16 kilobytes and counting. Picture: Royal Bank's Paul Bimm demonstrates the home e-cash unit (by Aastra).