MasterCard has announced that it has asked the court to order separate trials of MasterCard and Visa in the Wal-Mart/merchant anti-trust lawsuit.

„After more than six years of litigation, 350 fact and expert depositions, and the exchange of millions of documents, plaintiffs have not - and cannot - prove by any evidence, much less a preponderance of evidence, any conspiracy between MasterCard and Visa,‰ Noah J. Hanft, MasterCard‚s general counsel, said. „MasterCard believes that if given the opportunity to have a full and fair trial based purely on its own acts, the case against it will fail, and its Honor All Cards rule, which requires that merchants who agree to accept MasterCard accept all MasterCard-branded cards, will be recognized as being pro-competitive and providing American consumers with the broadest choice of payment options in the world,‰ Hanft said.

MasterCard has announced that a number of technology vendors are supporting its $1.99 multi-application smart card initiative.

MasterCard first introduced its MULTOS-based multi-application smart card under its US$2.99 chip program in December 2000. Now, MasterCard has brought down the price of its state of the art, 16K multi-application MULTOS card by 33 percent to US$1.99. The US$1.99 card contains MasterCard's EMV compliant M/Chip credit/debit application, Mondex e-cash, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) file storage and PKI identification applications built into the chip, ready for enablement as required by MasterCard's member financial institutions. The ability to offer these high specification smart cards at such a competitive price was made possible by the increasing numbers of such cards being issued.

My partner, Allen Weinberg, has just completed a new research report on Biometrics in Financial Services.

This advisory report investigates the fit of biometrics to financial service applications, looking first at market structure, key biometric concepts, and common misconceptions before moving on to explore potential application areas in financial services and adoption challenges.

Robert Mitchell writes about the recent theft of 8 million credict card numbers from a processor.

The card associations' policies, as demonstrated, could be described thusly: Don't publicize credit card thefts in any way; don't require card issuers to notify affected card owners unless they ask; don't share the list of compromised account numbers with merchants; and don't require banks to reissue stolen cards. And don't worry -- banks will monitor accounts for "unusual activity" with automated, high-tech monitoring tools.