Visa unveils credit card with own PIN pad
Credit-card company Visa showcased its latest developments in payment technology alongside announcements on field trials and payment services upgrades at the Cartes and Identification Show in Paris last week.
The company said that in the next few months, a trial of payment cards with their own PIN pads will start with four banks: Cal in Israel, Cornèr Bank in Switzerland, IW Bank in Italy and MBNA in the UK.
The cards will feature a 12-button keypad and an LCD display powered by a battery which lasts up to four years, according to Visa.
When a customer punches their PIN into the card's keypad, the display on the card shows a one-time code that the customer can then use to authenticate their purchases online. The card is designed to thwart fraudsters by introducing an authentication code and including PIN entry as part of the card-not-present purchase.
Visa Europe SVP head of innovation and new products Sandra Alzetta said the interest from industry in the product "has been overwhelming".
Alzetta told ZDNet.co.uk's sister site, silicon.com, the transition from contactless payment cards to near-field communication (NFC) mobile devices is also firmly on Visa's long-term agenda and to that end the company has entered into an agreement with mobile carrier O2 and SIM card manufacturer Giesecke & Devrient to demonstrate a SIM-based NFC-payment technology.
The demo tests a SIM toolkit application devised by Visa which sits alongside a Visa payment applet, allowing customers to manage their payments through the mobile device and make payments by waving the device over a scanner.
The application also allows customers to remotely disable the device as a payment method, if it is lost or stolen.
Alzetta said the development comes in response to customers who have trialled mobile payments with Visa, such as customers of Transport for London (TfL). According to Alzetta, TfL users pleased with the service, but expressed a wish to have more control over the choice of hosting device.
Another development which is also the result of customer surveys is a revamp of the Verified by Visa online purchasing process. According to a spokesman, the number of transactions authenticated by Verified by Visa in Europe has grown by 104 per cent in the last two years and, in the past 12 months, the service handled over 100 million transactions worth over £13bn.
A key feature of the new interface is that it visually remains within the site the customer made the purchase through, reassuring them they haven't been diverted to a phishing site. The interface also makes it much clearer how far in the authentication process the customer has come, giving them an indication how long the process is going to take.
The spokesman said the revamp is intended to reduce the amount of abandoned transactions by smoothing out the authentication process.