Ping Identity's Ashish Jain and Patrick Harding have been working with Sid Sidner, a master engineer at ACI Worldwide and architect for ACI’s virtual SET wallet and 3D-Secure products. Together, we've been bridging the worlds of eCommerce, payment systems and the identity metasystem. In two weeks, the companies will demonstrate the use of managed Information Cards for secure online purchasing. You'll be able to see the demo at Ping Identity's Federation Users Group at Digital ID World or at a dedicated presentation by Sid on Tuesday at 2:05pm. Sid's session on Tuesday will cover:

- Who is ACI?
- Why this presentation: a new use case for e-commerce
- InfoCard 101
- Payments 101
- e-commerce security: 3D-Secure 101
- Why InfoCards are (almost) perfect for this use case
- The ACI-Ping Identity demo
- Why we are such excellent partners
- The two user experiences: get a card, use a card
- The components
- What does it take to make it happen
- Adoption of InfoCards
- Small change to the identity selectors
- Adoption by the payment providers (PCI, PayPal, etc.)
- Adoption by merchants
- Adoption by consumers
 
Backgrounder

The identity metasystem concept embodied in Information Cards has applications beyond pure authentication.  For example, Information Cards could be excellent for supplying payment data to an e-commerce merchant during a purchase.

It would go like this: A payment provider such as a bank or PayPal issues a consumer a payment Information Card.  Then the consumer can use it at participating merchants.  They simply click a button which activates the identity selector software on their PC, phone, or set-top box - an identity selector like Microsoft's CardSpace or any of the other ones being developed.  The consumer selects the payment Information Card of their choice, enters their PIN, and the identity selector gets the payment information from the payment provider and returns it to the merchant.

The consumer will like it because they don't have to type in the card number, expiration date, CVV, and billing address.  The merchant will like it because the clickpath to order submission is shorter; they will should get better merchant fees and fraud risk; and they don't have to store sensitive cardholder information in their databases.  The payment provider will like it because they can dramatically lower their e-commerce fraud.

An exciting aspect of this is that the 3D-Secure protocol used by Visa, MasterCard, and JCB, as well as the PayPal protocol could easily be adapted to support Information Cards.

ACI Worldwide is the world leader in retail payments - over half the plastic card transactions in the world (55 billion last year) go through ACI's software at banks, merchants and networks in over 85 countries.  Ping Identity is one of the leaders in the development and implementation of Information Cards.  The two companies have put their heads together to develop a demo of shopping with a payment Information Card.  They will be showing this during Digital ID World 2007 at Ping Identity's booth, #404.