PC Week

SET Products Trickle Out Despite Test Lag

By Jim Kerstetter, PC Week, January 19, 1997

While credit card organizations continue to tinker with the Secure Electronic Transaction specification before finishing it this spring, vendors are getting a jump on rolling out products in support of the fledgling commerce technology. Terisa Systems Inc. will announce SecureWeb Payments, an add-on to the company’s SecureWeb Toolkit, at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco next week.

SecureWeb Payments allows browser, server and HTTP application developers to add SET capabilities to their software.

The SET tool kit add-on will be priced at $50,000 for current SecureWeb tool kits. The price for new users should be about $100,000, said Allan Schiffman, chief technical officer at Terisa, in Los Altos, Calif.

Schiffman, who has been involved with SET development for more than a year, said he expects Visa International Inc. and MasterCard International Inc. to make several dozen minor edits to the spec before it is completed, which shouldn’t hinder implementations using the Terisa tool kits.

But the credit card companies have vastly differing views of the specification’s status. A Visa USA official in Foster City, Calif., downplayed the near-completion of SET that MasterCard enthusiastically touted earlier this month.

Visa is striking a tone that is as conservative as MasterCard’s is aggressive, and is advising users to avoid using credit cards on the Internet until the SET specification is completed and a certification process for SET-enabled software is established.

“We believe the card holder and the merchant have the best opportunity for a secure transaction with a full SET environment,” said Stephanie Keller-Bottom, vice president of electronic commerce for Visa USA. “We don’t think that’s there yet.”

But executives at some online companies scoffed at Visa’s warning.

“That sounds more like marketing to me,” said Lawrence Peryer, sales director of CD Universe Inc., in Wallingford, Conn. CD Universe has been accepting credit card orders via the Internet for several months, Peryer said, using the Secure Socket Layer encryption of Netscape Communications Corp.’s Commerce Server. There have been no problems so far, he said.

Visa is running compatibility tests of SET-enabled applications in an internal laboratory. Several interoperability tests with Visa member banks are planned to begin this spring, said officials.

Also unlike MasterCard, which is relying on third parties such as the Open Group for interoperability testing, Visa will manage its own interoperability projects.

Terisa can be reached at (415) 919-1750 or www.terisa.com.