Dear Friends As a layman and bureaucrat, I am afraid I find the card/payment scene bathed in thick fog sometimes! Suffice it to say, for the present: - we may be creating a CEN/ISSS Workshop to validate and publish the results of DISTINCT - we may be doing the same for FINREAD (but the interface between the two needs sorting out) - we are in the very initial phases of discussion with the Commission about a wider activity, perhaps under a formal mandate to the European Standards Organizations, concerning European electronic purse requirements, building on at the very least on the current work within the European Committee for Banking Standards, but hopefully more comprehensive. This follows criticism eg in the European parliament that there is insufficient (ie virtually no) cross-frontier inter-operability of purse cards, or for that matter any kind of financial transactions (the arrival of the EURO means we should not have still to pay enormous bank charges for such transactions within the zone) - I am not sure it is quite correct to say that there has been "little" work in CEN on cards - TC224 has been around an awfully long time and projected its work into ISO. The problem is that the CEN and ISO standards have not received full market consensus. But in the current context, in Europe at least, the Commission will be forced down a legislative route eventually unless there is more such consensus. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Best regards John Ketchell Director, CEN/ISSS - Information Society Standardization System URL:http://www.cenorm.be/isss Rue de Stassart, 36 email (direct) [EMAIL PROTECTED] B-1050 Brussels email (secretariat) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Belgium Tel (direct) + 32 2 550 08 46 Fax + 32 2 550 09 66 Tel (secretariat) + 32 2 550 08 13 Tel (GSM) +32 75 594 828 Visit the OpenCard Framework's WWW site at http://www.opencard.org/ for access to documentation, code, presentations, and OCF announcements. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the OCF Mailing list, send a mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" with the word "unsubscribe" in the BODY of the message.
