MasterCard International said two banks in Taiwan have successfully tested the interbank interoperability of the Secure Electronic Transactions protocol.
In a transaction completed May 16, Roland Cheung, Citibank's country chief for credit cards, bought a compact disk recording from a MasterCard- accepting merchant served by China Trust Commercial Bank.
The transaction, said to be the first using SET between banks, flowed over an IBM-supported infrastructure, with digital certificates provided by GTE Corp.
Taiwan is a hotbed of on-line commerce development, with more than 50 cybermalls up and running, said Thomas Pouliot, MasterCard's vice president for electronic commerce.