American Express Co.'s introduction of the first smart card application available on the Internet could inspire similar programs from other issuers.
A Visa U.S.A. executive called American Express' Web application for its Blue card promising and said that Visa issuers would be watching it carefully, perhaps with an eye toward offering a similar program.
ID Keeper, unveiled on Wednesday, stores favorite Web addresses, passwords, user names, credit card numbers, and shipping addresses. Blue cardholders can download the software from the company's Web site using their card reader device.
David Bonalle, the Amex vice president and general manager of advanced payments development in charge of ID Keeper, said it has been offered informally to Blue cardholders for some time and has prompted a spike in card reader requests. He said customers began downloading the software immediately after it became available on the Web site, a number of weeks before it was announced.
ID Keeper should be more popular than other programs, such as digital wallets that store user identification, Mr. Bonalle said.
He said he was surprised at how savvy consumers are about privacy issues, such as password security.
"With the wallet, whatever you were storing was still in cyberspace somewhere, potentially observable" by outsiders or hackers, Mr. Bonalle said. "With this, you are pulling it out of your reader, and it can't be accessed via the Internet."
An Amex spokesman said that the program will probably be cited in future advertising for Blue, but he would not talk about specific plans to market it.
Diana Knox, the senior vice president of emerging channels at the San Francisco-based Visa, said three member banks that do not yet issue smart cards have built the infrastructure to do so. They could begin issuing the cards almost immediately if there were developments, like the introduction of programs such as ID Keeper, that would make the cards appealing, she said.
The four Visa members that issue smart cards, Target Corp., Bank One Corp., FleetBoston Corp., and Providian Financial Corp., have offered few uses for them. "If cardholders don't have a place to use the cards, all we have is an expensive card," Ms. Knox said.
Whether ID Keeper pushes more Visa issuers off the chip-card fence "depends on the extent to which the issuer strategy is aligned with American Express," she said. "It would be issuers who are interested in using this card more aggressively in building online volume and acquiring customers who are interested in doing business online."
