Electronic Payment Systems on Open Computer Networks A Survey.pdfVIP

Electronic Payment Systems on Open Computer Networks: A Survey Working paper Thomi Pilioura Abstract The extraordinary growth of international interconnected computer networks and the pervasive trend of using these networks as a new field for conducting business processes is stimulating the demand for new payment methods. These new methods must attain high levels of security, speed, privacy, decentralisation and internationalisation for electronic commerce to be accepted by both consumers and businesses. This paper surveys the state of the art in payment technologies and sketches emerging developments. 1 Introduction New electronic technologies are combining with an emerging global information economy on the Internet to change the way we do business. In the centre of these developments are electronic payment mechanisms that provide the financial infrastructure needed to open the electronic marketplace. This paper gives an overview of these new payment mechanisms by describing and evaluating some of those that currently exist or are being developed. These reviews and evaluations are necessarily somewhat tentative, because the various systems are at different stages of development and the various companies operate at different levels of public disclosure. This paper is organised in the following way. In the second section, we propose a classification schema for the different electronic payment systems. For each category we choose a few representative systems to be examined in this paper. In the