Everyone at Ping knows I have a real hot button for the words ‘identity’ and ‘payment’ spoken in the same sentence. It’s with great pleasure then that I announce Ping Identity’s Ashish Jain and
Patrick Harding have been working with Sid Sidner, a master engineer at
ACI Worldwide and architect for ACI’s virtual SET wallet and 3D-Secure
products to bridge the worlds of eCommerce,
payment systems and the identity metasystem.
In two weeks, the
companies will demonstrate the use of managed Information Cards for
secure online purchasing. You’ll be able to see the demo at Ping
Identity’s Federation Users Group, taking place during Digital ID World 2007 or at a dedicated
presentation by Sid on Tuesday at 2:05pm.
ACI
Worldwide is the world leader in retail payments – over half the
plastic card transactions in the world (55 billion last year) go
through ACI’s software at banks, merchants and networks in over 85
countries. Ping Identity is
one of the leaders in the development and implementation of Information
Cards. The two companies have put their heads together to develop a
demo of shopping with a payment Information Card. They will be showing
this during Digital ID World 2007 at Ping Identity’s booth, #404.
Backgrounder
The
identity metasystem concept embodied in Information Cards has
applications beyond pure authentication. For example, Information
Cards could be excellent for supplying payment data to an e-commerce
merchant during a purchase.
It would go like this: A payment
provider such as a bank or PayPal issues a consumer a payment
Information Card. Then the consumer can use it at participating
merchants. They simply click a button which activates the identity
selector software on their PC, phone, or set-top box – an identity
selector like Microsoft’s CardSpace or any of the other ones being
developed. The consumer selects the payment Information Card of their
choice, enters their PIN, and the identity selector gets the payment
information from the payment provider and returns it to the merchant.
The
consumer will like it because they don’t have to type in the card
number, expiration date, CVV, and billing address. The merchant will
like it because the clickpath to order submission is shorter; they will
should get better merchant fees and fraud risk; and they don’t have to
store sensitive cardholder information in their databases. The payment
provider will like it because they can dramatically lower their
e-commerce fraud.
An exciting aspect of this is that the
3D-Secure protocol used by Visa, MasterCard, and JCB, as well as the
PayPal protocol could easily be adapted to support Information Cards.