Credit card companies and technology giants have formed a consortium to standardize on an e-wallet to aid consumer shopping online. If Visa, MasterCard and Amex could overlook their considerable differences for a slice of the e-commerce pie, then AOL, Compaq, Microsoft, IBM and Sun weren’t about to be left behind. Merchants Nordstrom, Dell, Beyond.com and Reel.com also came to the party. A single e-wallet protocol will let them set up a standard payment system instead of having to support many competing products, as they do now.
The proposed protocol is called the Electronic Commerce Modeling Language (ECML), and it will work as a universal format for presenting information in e-wallets. It will use a choice of the popular secure sockets layer (SSL) and the more powerful but less widely adopted secure electronic transaction (SET) encryption systems. Microsoft says it will use ECML in its Passport e- payment product; Sun will include it in its JavaWallet. Whether we’re competitors or not, this gives us all a bigger pie, Microsoft’s consumer commerce group general manager, Blake Irving, told the Wall Street Journal.
