Legal notice Neither the European Commission nor any person acting on behalf of the Commission is responsible for the use which might be made of the following information. Abstract The first Background paper of the Electronic Payment Systems Observatory (ePSO) identifies the strategic and technical issues that will be discussed in the ePSO Forum – an online discussion group consisting of paymen...

In the next years, the market for low value online content, like music and videos, is expected to grow substantially. To allow “pay-per-use” of such content, micropayment systems are expected to play an important role. Since there are already many competing micropayment systems on the market, customers and merchants are forced to use multiple systems. To overcome the problems associated with us...

This case features TradeCard Inc., a New York-based financial supply chain service provider, and its plan to expand into the China market. The case discusses how a structured B2B online payment system such as TradeCard can be marketed in China and how TradeCard Inc. can create a critical mass of users in China.

Micro-payment systems have the potential to provide non-intrusive, high-volume and low-cost pay-as-you-use services for a wide variety of webbased applications. However, adding micro-payment support to web-sites is usually time-consuming and intrusive, both to the web site’s software architecture and its user interface implementation. We describe a plug-in, component model for adding micro-paym...

With the development of the information technology, using Internet to pay for goods and services has become a very popular application. The traditional forms of payment can not be applied to e-commerce environment. Because of the complexity of online transactions related to capital flows and goods flows, the transaction process requires higher security and reliability. One mature approach for e...