CASSIS Services Sdn Bhd, a company founded by Dr Marc Lassus, has collaborated with SK Telecom of South Korea to bring to consumers a way to use their third-generation (3G) cellular phones as stand-ins for credit cards.

CASSIS International chief executive Chua Thian Yee said this method of credit card transaction was more convenient and secure than handing one’s card to a merchant. And Malaysian consumers just might have a chance to try it out in the coming year.

Chua said that in the pilot project, concluded late last year, VISA cardholders in South Korea were able to download a payment agent onto their 3G phones. Then they were able to use the phones for credit card transactions, by aiming their phones at merchants’ point-of-sale terminals fitted with infrared dongles.

The SK Telecom project was now in the rollout phase, and was expected to sign up some four million users by the end of 2004, Chua said. The solution was based on the EMV standard and the Universal Subscriber Identification Module (USIM) smartcard standards.

The latter provided for storing encrypted cardholder information on the Subscriber Identification Module (SIM) chip in the phone, and for a personal identification number. The SK Telecom project used the cardholder’s national identity number.

A cardholder’s card information would be sent to a download server, enabling a short message service (SMS) or web download into the cardholder’s EMV-compliant SIM chip.

It was a “post-issuance” solution, meaning that it was aimed at people who already had credit cards, Chua said.

This meant a bank could market the solution to an existing cardholder base, rather than requiring them to get a new credit card in order to use the service.

CASSIS’ solution was developed by a Malaysian team at CASSIS Services, a Multimedia Super Corridor-status company, according to Chua and Dr Lassus. Among CASSIS Services’ other successes were the Asia Pacific region’s first EMV-compliant MC2 MasterCard credit card, and the world’s first EMV-compliant chip card with loyalty features.