from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Fortune Cookie Internet Payments Come to China Order that neat Falun Gong poster today. BEIJING, Jul 31, 2000 -- (Virtual China) E-commerce in China has taken a giant step forward with a new payment processing platform that allows Web surfers in Shanghai to buy products over the Internet no matter at which bank they keep their accounts. The new system, designed by ChinaPay.com, is significant because the development of e-commerce in China has been hindered by the lack of a single, universal, secure online payment platform accessible to all bank card holders. The company announced the new service Friday during a high-profile launch ceremony at Shanghai's Portman Hotel, which was attended by representatives of China's four major commercial banks, according to a company statement. ChinaPay.com's new third-party payment processing service, 1LinkPay system, uses a city-wide payment processing network in Shanghai and is the first system in China to that can be used by bank account holders at any bank in a single city. NATIONAL COVERAGE "We're going to work hard at promoting ChinaPay.com as a consumer brand," said Sam Flemming, a spokesman for ChinaPay.com. "When people see our logo on a Web site they can rest assured that they can buy something easily and safely." ChinaPay.com hopes to expand the service to Beijing, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, and parts of Shandong province by the early fall. "Everybody wants national coverage," Flemming said in a phone interview from his office in Shanghai. "That's just the name of the game. But it takes time." A joint venture of Shanghai Bank Card Network Service Center (SNET) and Shanghai Huateng Software System Co. Ltd. (Huateng SCUBE), ChinaPay.com uses SNET's offline payment processing network that links all the banks in Shanghai. That network, the Shanghai Golden Card network, is part of the six-year-old Golden Card project, an official Chinese government program that has successfully linked all of China's banks in a single automatic teller machine (ATM) and point of sales (POS) system. Fifteen other provincial network centers collaborate in the Golden Card project, although ChinaPay.com has reached a working arrangement only with the Shanghai center, so far. DIGITAL CERTIFICATES "We need to get it up and running here first, and then step by step we can add other cities," Flemming said. The fact that Huateng built nearly half of the Golden Card networks around the country gives it a competitive advantage as it rolls out its online payments system, Flemming said. Last November, Huateng installed a "certificate-based payment gateway" in Shanghai that signalled the city's emergence as the national pilot city for e-commerce transactions. Users of the system were required to download a digital certificate, and also to go to a bank and a third party certification authority (CA), before they could make online purchases. ChinaPay.com updated that earlier system with a so-called "secure socket layer (SSL)" payment gateway. SSL is the technology used by most payment platforms in the U.S. and allows a consumer to make online purchases from their homes. So far, Eachnet.com, Homeway.com.cn, ChinaNow.com, MyCity.com.cn, and Wind.com.cn have signed on with ChinaPay.com's platform. Future deals with Web-based merchants will be key to whether 1LinkPay becomes a national standard for online payment. CONFIDENTIAL INFO The company will therefore devote most of its resources to bringing e-commerce partners on board, Flemming said. The company now has a staff of 12, nine of whom are in marketing and sales. Many Web sites in China still need to develop their own back-end services, which has slowed the number of merchants currently using ChinaPay.com's service. The company itself was reluctant to move too quickly to add clients, because the system was still being tested until recently. "We're dealing with payment," Flemming said. "You have to be very careful with these things." ChinaPay.com's payment processing service functions like an application service provider (ASP), renting out its the processing service to online merchants. A buyer who logs onto an e-commerce site that uses this service will be transferred when inputting their card information to another Web page that resides in ChinaPay.com's own servers -- not in the merchant's servers. This way, a user's bankcard information remains confidential and cannot be accessed by the merchant. The 1LinkPay service uses RSN 1024-bit public key security technology, according to ChinaPay.com's press release. But the company would not respond to questions about whether they were licensed to use the technology. PAYMENT OPTIONS Representatives of the Bedford, Mass.-based RSA Security Inc. would not say whether they had licensed Huateng or ChinaPay.com to use the advanced encryption technology. Internet users in China buy relatively little online. A recent market survey shows that only five percent of China's more than 12 million Internet users have purchased something over the Internet. In addition to the fact that China has one of the highest savings rates in the world, the low rate of Internet purchases could be a result of insufficient payment options and doubts among users about security. "There aren't very many payment options out there for true online payment using bankcards," Flemming said. Internet users in China have been limited to two bankcard options when trying to make an online purchase: China Merchant Bank and Bank of China. Security and privacy are also a cause of concern for many, Flemming said, and "we hope to address those issues." Cyber Beijing is a similar service that seeks to offer an online payment platform for bank card holders from different banks. A joint venture enterprise backed by China Information Highway, a leading Internet service provider (ISP) in Beijing, Cyber Beijing has the support of the People's Bank of China and many official agencies in Beijing, including the Beijing Municipal Government, the Ministry of Information Industry, and the National Department of Domestic Trade. "The difference between what we're doing and what they're doing is that we're making use of this Golden Card network, and they are not," Flemming said. (C) 2000 Virtual China - a comprehensive China gateway site featuring news, information, tools, and resources covering trade, finance, information technology, travel, and the arts. Virtual China, July 31, 2000 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. 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