Newcastle Building
Societyis to be the issuing bank for a
pioneering study that will see an initial 5,000 smart pre-payment
cards replace cash and cheques for financial
transactions.
The £4.4bn lender will work with MasterCard and
Carta,
the two-year-old Canadian firm formed by Mondex and
Mint, which will handle customer acquisition, card
personalisation and transaction processing.
Geoff Crellin, Carta head of strategic partnerships, said it
will approach firms that deal in relatively small quantities of
cash per transaction, such as mobile phone operators and health
care insurers, to take up the scheme which it will roll out later
this year. Other potential partners include the Post Office and
retailers such as Tesco that have multiple product lines, including
banking.
"Cardholders could use their cards to top up their mobile
phones, and insurers could transfer payments to healthcare
professionals as well as the insured following a claim for
treatment," he said. Employers could pay salaries direct to the
card, and the card holder could set up standing orders, he
said.
The smartcard Newcastle will issue uses the Multos chip with
Chip & Pin. Different data caches permit different applications
to be loaded onto the card and keeps separate the respective data
for each.
The card can work as an Europay, MasterCard or Visa contactless
card for fast low value purchases such as parking tickets, as well
as authenticate higher value transactions. It can also work with a
Nokia mobile phone for internet-based transactions.
The Multos Consortium supplies cards for banking, travel,
identity and security applications. They include the
Hong Kong and Saudi
Arabian national identity cards, the
Taiwanese MoneyCard for travel and shopping, and the Brazilian
Banrisul Bank's Cartao
Multiplos payment and internet authorisation card, where
transactions are digitally signed by the ICP-Brasil, the national
public key encryption standards body.