The objective of the system is to facilitate ease of executing various ATM as well as general shopping transactions. While giving a loyal customer base to the Service Provider, the system will reduce e-wallet loading and spending pain, time, and certainty of the public in this busy world.

Business Problems
The next big step in the e-commerce world in country like India is the common use of smart card based e-wallets.
In a country like India with weak communication network/Infrastructure, e-payments haven’t been able to pick up to its potential. Use of credit cards has been limited to big stores and merchants with availability of dedicated phone lines and infrastructure. Due to high cost of online connectivity, it hasn’t reached to small merchants or at places where online connectivity is not reliable or available.
Along with this, smart card based e-wallet systems that had been proposed in past were not been able to materialize there full potential. This is mainly due to the fact that people had to carry cash to the merchant outlets to get it loaded on the card and then spend it. The beauty of cashless transactions is lost in the process as first withdrawing cash from the bank and then carrying cash to the merchant had inherent security implications.

The Solution

A smart card based e-wallet system was proposed to promote e-payment for small as well as large transactions. The purpose of an e-wallet is to make offline purchases simple. Along with smart cards, the card also carries a magnetic stripe which stores the banking information to enable it to be used as ATM card. Smart card readers were integrated with ATM machines to enable loading of money directly from a users account into the smart card’s e-wallet. A user inserts the card into the ATM slot and enters his or her ATM pin. If the user chooses to load money on the card rather than taking cash, the e-wallet is credit with the amount for which authorization was taken from the switch. This resulted in a total cashless transaction where in money is directly loaded from a user’s bank account into the user’s smart card based e-wallet.
User can now take this card to any merchant who has POS (Point of Sale terminal). The e-wallet is protected by a PIN (Personal Identification Number). User makes a purchase, and pays for it using smart wallet after entering his or her PIN on the POS. Merchants than upload these transactions once in a day at the central host. The host has a clearing system using which the merchants are paid the amount bank owes them (total of transactions done by various users). Either a check is given to them or the money is directly debited in there accounts thus resulting in total cashless transaction.
From technical point of view, the card operating system used for the smart cards was designed on the Java Card framework. This eliminated dependency on the card provider since java cards can be procured from any card vendor and the same OS can be loaded on them to be used in the system.

Benefits

There are multitude benefits given by this system. It has inherent benefits of e-wallet system as well as benefits due to dual utility card:

Secure Money: Since the e-wallet is secured with a PIN, even in case of theft or loss of card, that money can’t be used by some other person.

Cashless transactions: All the payments are done in e-Payment mode, there is no cash involved and thus the risk of carrying cash is also removed for merchants as well as for customers.

Increased revenues: It is a proven phenomenon that e-payments increase the spending of card users, there by resulting in increase of revenue for merchants and thus in turn the increase of commission charges for the bank.

Increased customer base: This was a new concept launched by the bank which helped them in increasing there customer base and hence there profits.

Smart card vendor independence: The COS (Card operating system) for this system was designed on Java Card; hence the dependency on any particular card vendor was eliminated. This resulted in better bargaining power for the bank and low cost of the system.

Technologies used

Card Operating System: JavaCard Operating System Framework, Schlumberger Payflex COS
Terminal: Schlumberger Magic Series Terminals
IDE: Visual c++ for host implementation
RDBMS: Oracle 8i