Electronic Cash and Smart Cards

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ELECTRONIC CASH AND SMART CARDS
Introduction
When you go into a store to make a purchase a monetary transaction takes place between a merchant, the provider and the consumer, which is you. Typically you would either use cash, check or credit card. If you are making a purchase less than five dollars it doesn’t seem reasonable to pay with a credit card or write a check. Electronic cash is the solution to this problem regardless how big or small the transaction is electronic cash is a viable alternative to traditional payment methods.

What is Electronic Cash?
In the past people had to go to the bank and stand in line to deposit or withdrawn money from their accounts. In today’s time, money is accessible with the help of a computer. The monetary value of your bank balance is available electronically through your banks computer. The electronic form of money defines what is referred to electronic cash. This boosts your purchasing power because your funds are available to you around the clock 24 hours a day, year round.

What is a Smart Card?
Smart card is a plastic card equivalent size to a credit card that holds embedded chip on which digital information of how much money your card or account holds. The chip stores this information and updates it along with every transaction that is made off this card. The process to use is you swipe the card to pay for a purchase and the swiping device deducts the purchase amount from the amount that is stored on the chip. Some debit cards are implemented the same way as smart cards.

Executive Summary
An electronic system, new form of payment that benefits society as a whole through Smart Cards. It creates less necessity to have physical cash and it holds the capacity and usage of the same cards ...

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...nts would be able to access your health records, driving records or any other information that would be present on the card. Disadvantage for merchants would be that they would have to invest smart card compliant terminal. This would add cost to train employees and most merchants have decided not to move forward with the adoption of smart card support unless there is a demand for it.
There has been many barriers to overcome with the use of smart cards, such as deposit insurance liability, data accuracy, transaction anonymity, risk of fraud. The software company, Sun Microsystems’ Java software removes or reduces many of the problems that were experienced by the implementation of smart cards. Java is now the standardized company used because it provides many advantages in its security, network awareness. Java has become the largest smart card application developer.

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