Scotiabank’s Barrie Smart Card Pilot Readies for Its Next Phase

An ambitious multi-application smart card pilot launched late last year in Barrie, Ontario, is ready to move to its next phase, which will involve signing up 40 more merchant locations in February. Toronto-based Scotiabank, the issuer of the cards, will not release how many it has issued so far, though Paymentech Canada, which is acquiring for the pilot, says it has processed 300 transactions since the project went live last November. Paymentech is signing up merchants for the pilot in Barrie that are already clients of the processor. Some 41 locations are live so far, with a goal of reaching 200. “It's going about as we expected,” says Drew Brown, president of Paymentech Canada, which until its October 2002 acquisition by Dallas-based Paymentech L.P. was the merchant-acquiring unit of Scotiabank. Although the bank will not say how many cards it has issued in Barrie, it said in a statement announcing the project in 2001 that it planned to have 12,000 residents participating. The town's population is 60,000. The first multi-application chip card project in Canada that is compliant with the so-called EMV standard for smart card transactions, the Barrie pilot so far features Visa credit card transactions secured by personal identification numbers. Instead of signing receipts, cardholders enter a PIN and insert their cards in a chip reader. The entered PIN must match the PIN encoded in the chip. This is the same standard being followed by U.K. issuers in a nationwide rollout of EMV-compliant cards now underway. Scotiabank, however, plans to introduce other applications over time, including a loyalty program and an electronic purse for small-value transactions. Although the chips are capable of running these other applications, a source within the bank indicates no firm timetable has been worked out for their introduction. In a statement released in November, the bank indicated it would use technology developed by Cardis Enterprises International B.V., a company based in the Netherlands, for the micropayments capability. The terminals for the project are supplied by Ingenico Corp., formerly IVI Checkmate. Barrie was the site of an earlier, non-EMV smart card pilot based on the Visa Cash Card. That project, in which Scotiabank was also the issuer, ran from 2000 until last year, giving Barrie the longest exposure to smart cards in Canada. Two other Canadian chip pilots involving other issuers, one starting in Guelph, Ontario and later moving to Sherbrooke, Quebec, and one in Kingston, Ontario, also were in operation for a time.