Currently, credit card transactions over the telephone and over the Web using SSL generally cost the merchant more, although there's no standard way to compare them. Nova Information Systems Inc. Foley and others believe the interoperability problems will be fixed eventually. Meanwhile, there has been progress. Earlier this year Hewlett-Packard's VeriFone subsidiary and IBM agreed to make their products interoperable. And several brands of wallets have been certified as meeting the SET standard.
Performance is the other big technical issue.
Transaction time has been clocked at 30 to 90 seconds, and no one really knows how much additional CPU muscle will be needed by the busy merchant or the back-end payment processor who's getting thousands of transactions simultaneously. Hardware accelerators from Tandem Computers Inc.'s Atalla division, Rainbow Technologies Inc. and others will help alleviate the situation, but at a price. A thinner client, recently announced by GlobeSet Inc., places most of the wallet application on the server, which speeds up the application. There's hope that sleeker cryptographic algorithms will solve the problem someday. But that won't happen soon.