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As Visa forges into Europe with a non-proprietary platform that it hopes will boost smart card use, a round of skepticism has greeted the San Francisco-based company on the other side of the Atlantic.
In October, Visa International trumpeted its announcement that a prominent European standards organization is adopting the Visa Open Platform as a basis for developing smart card applications used with GSM communications cellular phones.
But industry observers say the European Telecommunications Standards Institute's endorsement of Visa's smart card platform will do little to awaken the moribund North American market for GSM-enabled smart card banking services.
"This will do very little to promote smart cards in the U.S.," says Octavio Marenzi, research director of Meridien Research, a Newton, MA-based financial services research firm. "Merchants haven't accepted smart cards, and consumers haven't been too keen, either. It's hard to see how consumer and merchant acceptance of [smart cards] is going to improve because of Visa Open Platform."
Visa Open Platform consists of a set of specifications and technologies for designing smart...