Air Travel Card Tries SET

By Lynn Woods / February 22, 1998

<B> Air Travel Card Tries SET</B>

By Lynn Woods

The Air Travel Card is running a pilot program for secure electronic transactions, or SET, over the Web with four member airlines under an agreement with VeriSign that gives ATC "certificate authority" with the airlines. The card company is working on agreements with software provider Verifone and EDS.

Currently, ATC customers insert a credit card number on purchase orders. The number gets encrypted, but it's still vulnerable. In the new procedure, encrypted messages from the sender enters an EDS gateway, which translates it for the merchant and sends it back.

ATC hopes to complete the pilot at the end of the quarter, with a general rollout in the second quarter of this year.