Electronic Payment Projects & Standards

Internet Open Trading Protocol

In October 1998, the IOTP [Internet Open Trading Protocol] draft version 1.0 was introduced at the IETF, to provide an interoperable framework for Internet commerce. IOTP defines message content and flows for the shopping site, the payment handler, the Delivery Handler and the customer-support provider.

Payment systems such as SET, Mondex, CyberCash and DigiCash are handled as plug-ins.

The IOTP defines:

• XML document components to describe the consumer and merchant organizations (signatures, payment handlers, shipping methods and destinations),
• the order (description of goods or services),
• the payment (currency and amount),
• the Delivery Component, pointers to customer service and handlers
• a digital signature to ensure integrity.

At the same time, the OBI [Open Buying on the Internet] consortium, sponsored personalization of catalogs based on certificates and secure synchronization of orders in both buyer and supplier systems.

This heralded the first milestone in electronic payment transfers outside of the banking EFT environment.

The following projects and standards formed the early foundations of electronic payments and funds transfers. Today, there are many hereditary offshoots of these primary sources.

Projects and Systems

Electronic Commerce and Security Frameworks

• European Union's ACTS Project SEMPER -- Secure Electronic Marketplace for Europe
• SunSoft Java Commerce
• CommerceNet's eCo Framework Project
• IETF's Internet Open Trading Protocol (TRADE) Working Group (which supersedes the former Open Trading Protocol (OTP) consortium)
• Open Buying on the Internet (OBI)
• RosettaNet

Payment Systems

Message and home-banking standards

• HBCI: Homebanking standard by the German ZKA, a central clearing organisation for German banks.
• Integrion Gold Standard
• Interactive Financial Exchange (IFX) Specification
• Open Financial Exchange (OFX)

Smartcard purses, and other smartcard-based payment systems

• Electronic Purse Schemes (by Leo Van Hove)
• CAFE: ESPRIT Project funded by the European Union. Untraceable electronic offline payment system (electronic cash)
• CEPS: Common Electronic Purse Specifications, by Europay International, SERMEPA, Visa International, ZKA
• Europay/MasterCard/VISA (EMV) Specifications. See also the related specifications from VISA
• Mondex: Transferable offline payment system based on smartcards.

Micropayment Systems

• IBM Micropayments (formerly known as MiniPay): micropayment scheme developed by IBM Haifa
• MilliCent (electronic microcommerce)
• NetBill Electronic Commerce Project (CMU)

Untraceable E-Cash

• Untraceable payment protocols by Stefan Brands
• CAFE: ESPRIT Project funded by the European Union. Untraceable electronic offline payment system (electronic cash)
• eCash (DigiCash): Swiss trial, German trial

E-Cheques

• FSTC Electronic Check, based on the FSML-Financial Services Markup Language, which in turn is based on SDML - Signed Document Markup Language (see also SDML pages at W3C).
• The Mandate Electronic Cheque, an electronic cheque system developed by a European research consortium
• NetCheque
• NetChex

E-Credit and Debit Cards

• CyberCash: An Application Level Internet Payment Syntax (Donald E. Eastlake 3rd, 07/07/1995) and CyberCash Credit Card Protocol Version 0.8 (Brian Boesch, Steve Crocker, Magdalena Yesil, 07/8/1995)
• Wenbo Mao (Hewlett Packard): A Secure, Cheap and Exportable/Importable Method for Internet Electronic Payments
• IBM's Internet Keyed Payment (iKP) System:
• Netscape's Secure Courier and Credit card payment applications over the internet (not available online anymore)
• Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) + Approved SET Extensions: Mastercard/VISA standard for creditcard payments over the Internet. Managed by "SET Secure Electronic Transaction LLC (SETCo)". Supersedes the earlier proposals STT (by VISA, Microsoft) and SEPP (by Mastercard, CyberCash, GTE, IBM, Netscape).

Trusted market providers

• GlobeID
• Open Market

• CommerceNet
• eCo System
• Stanford University Digital Libraries Project
• Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC),"a consortium of financial services providers, national laboratories, universities, and government agencies who sponsor and participate in non-competitive collaborative research and development on interbank technical projects." List of projects.
• SEMPER - Secure Electronic Marketplace for Europe
• Univ. St Gallen: Electronic Markets and TeleCounter Electronic Banking
• IETF Working Group
• ESPRIT's electronic commerce home page
• European ePayment Systems Observatory

Marketplaces

• Internet Shopping Network
• NetMarket: Small scale project, similar to CommerceNet, but really commercial. Based on PGP and Mosaic/Netscape.
• Open Market
• MarketNet - The Electronic Marketplace

Related Systems

• Digital Notary System (Surety Technologies)

Electronic Payments Index

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