In five years the Mondex Electronic Purse had gone from an idea, through a municipality-wide pilot, to a global alternative to cash. Many issues now confronted the senior management of the newly incorporated Mondex International Ltd (MXI). Among these were establishing an infrastructure to support, and policies to coordinate, the international banking consortiums that had joined the Mondex scheme, forging a migration path into the world of Internet based payments, and deciding what role MXI would play in new markets.
Electronic Purses vs. Cash
In the fall of 1996 there was widespread interest in alternative payment schemes, particularly in the emerging internet marketplace. The Mondex electronic purse appeared to have considerable potential as an engine of electronic commerce. It might also transform traditional cash payments.
The purse was a smart card alternative to cash. With 90% of worldwide payments paid in cash, a majority of which were under $10, cash remained a popular payment alternative. While the credit card or debit card involved money being leant by the financial institution or retrieved from an account -- the Mondex purse, a self-standing value store, required no remote approval of individual transactions. Rather, Mondex value equivalent to cash was stored in the card's microchip as were secure programs for manipulating that value and for interfacing with other Mondex cards or terminals. Thus, a customer could provide his or her card to a merchant's point of sale device and authorize transferal of a certain amount of value (see Exhibit 1). That amount would then be electronically deducted from the chip inside the customer's card and added to the amount on the retailer's chip. All this was accomplished without accessing the customer's bank balance or checking his or her credit worthiness.
The most significant advantage of Mondex was in its use for very small transactions. Customer convenience was another feature. Value could be loaded on the card either from an ATM machine or from a phone. It could then be transferred from one card to another via a special, password protected, electronic wallet. An electronic keychain let card holders check their balances. The first implementation supported up to five different currencies, each separately accounted for by the card. Just like cash, if the card is lost or stolen, the cardholder has lost real money. However, to safeguard cardholders, Mondex developed a unique feature which allowed cardholders to lock the value on the card with a four digit personal number thereby safeguarding the value held on the card.