The bank fraud blame game

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

R. Hirschfeld wrote:
> During the course of the CAFE project some commercial electronic purse
> systems emerged, notably Proton (from Banksys in Belgium, replicated
> in other counties under other names) and Mondex.  These were in many
> ways less sophisticated than CAFE's system (which was multi-issuer,
> multi-currency, privacy-respecting, etc.) but had serious commercial
> backing.  For the most part these seem to have stagnated or died.  I
> suspect that getting them to catch on would require drastic measures
> such as:

we had gotten tasked to do a design and costing of mondex implementation
in the states (all the transaction processing dataprocessing, sizing
capacity and resources, etc) ... and looking at pricing various kinds
of mondex related transactions ("super brick" from mondex international
and how it flowed thru the rest of the infrastructure).

the conclusion we came up with was that nearly all the financial
justification for mondex was in the float. later there were scenarios
where mondex international was encouraging deployment in various
countries by offering to split the float with the chartered
mondex national body (and then it seemed like float offerings were
starting to peculate down to financial institutions lower in
the mondex hierarchy)

then along came an EU statement that mondex (and similar implementations)
would only be given a grace period with regard to retaining the float
(as a mechanism to underwrite start-up costs) ... but after a period
of 2-3 yrs, they were then going to be required to start paying interest on
balances carried in the cards. after that, much of the interest(?) seemed
to evaporate.

separately there were some issues with the chip technology being
used in the mondex cards.

misc. past posts mentioning mondex.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay6.htm#cacr7 7th CACR Information Security Workshop
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm6.htm#digcash IP: Re: Why we don't use digital cash
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm7.htm#idcard2 AGAINST ID CARDS
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm18.htm#42 Payment Application Programmers Interface (API) for IOTP
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm20.htm#7 EMV
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm21.htm#1 Is there any future for smartcards?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm23.htm#23 Payment systems - the explosion of 1995 is happening in 2006
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm25.htm#31 On-card displays
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#14 EMV cards
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#18 Opinion  on smartcard security requested
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#53 Are you sure about MONDEX?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#54 Are you sure about MONDEX?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004j.html#12 US fiscal policy (Was: Bob Bemer, Computer Pioneer,Father of ASCII,Invento
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004j.html#14 US fiscal policy (Was: Bob Bemer, Computer Pioneer,Father of ASCII,Invento
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005i.html#10 Revoking the Root
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005v.html#1 Is Mondex secure?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#47 newbie need help (ECC and wireless)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007i.html#57 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies

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