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Discover Financial Services Inc.'s Pulse electronic funds transfer network Monday announced plans to test Acculynk Inc.'s PaySecure Internet PIN-debit technology. The test probably will run three to six months, and Pulse's goal is to determine how PIN debit meets the varying needs of online merchants, consumers and card issuers, says Judith McGuire, the Houston-based network's senior vice president of product management. "We've been talking to issuers and merchants alike," McGuire tells CardLine sister publication American Banker. "That's part of what we want to validate in this pilot, the underlying business assumptions." The merchants' interest is the easiest to guess; PIN transactions carry lower interchange rates and lower fraud risk than card-not-present transactions do. But the attitudes of consumers and card issuers may be trickier to assess, McGuire says. "We're trying to understand the consumer response. Do they understand it? Are they comfortable with it?" McGuire says. Besides Pulse, Acculynk is involved in tests with Metavante Technologies Inc.'s NYCE debit network and with Fiserv Inc.'s Accel/Exchange EFT network (CardLine 3/4). Atlanta-based Acculynk enables PIN-debit purchases online by integrating its PaySecure software into a merchant's online-checkout system. Cardholders use their computer's mouse to enter their four-digit PIN into an Acculynk virtual PIN pad that appears on the computer's monitor.
