Two credit card companies, Visa Israel Credit Cards and Isracard are to carry out next month, a trial operation of an Israeli system to purchase products via the Internet, based on the international security standard, SET. This was announced yesterday by Oren Shavit, CEO of Caspit, the company which is administering the project and responsible for drafting the standard.
According to Shavit, several months ago, Visa established a founding team for developing the standard. The team includes Hewlett Packard, Israel, Caspit, Microsoft Israel, VeriFone and GTE.
Shavit said the first trial started in April, when the system was checked out by 70 participants who bought products via the Web.
Shavit also said the development was conducted in collaboration with Microsoft, which is to add an "Internet electronic wallet," for Hebrew versions of Windows ’98 and Internet Explorer 5. Contrary to credit card payment systems, in Israel it will be possible to pay in foreign currency as well as shekels. Shavit said that this characteristic will grant numerous advantages to Israeli export companies.
Published by Israel's Business Arena June 23, 1998.