In a press conference held in İstanbul on Tuesday, representatives from Visa Europe and YapıKredi released details of the CodeSure card trial, which will start in Turkey in April. The card produces a one-time use passcode after the consumer enters a PIN on a numerical pad on the back of the card. This system does away with the need for separate electronic devices to generate these codes. Not only does the card make it easier to access online banking services and carry out card-not-present (CNP) transactions such as online and telephone shopping, it also has potential as a passcode generator for connecting to corporate networks.
The 1,000-person trial will be the largest in Europe, and Serkan Ülgen, the head of the consumer marketing credit cards and consumer lending division at YapıKredi, stated they hope to introduce it as a limited-availability product in the second half of this year. He added that YapıKredi was not “setting aggressive targets for this product for the first year,” saying it may take time for customers to adopt the technology. Sandra Alzetta, the senior vice president of innovation, new product and channel development at Visa Europe, noted that trials are currently under way in Italy, Israel, Switzerland, and the UK, but stressed that Turkey’s rapidly growing Internet shopping sector and the ease with which it accepts new technologies meant that the large trial was welcomed by both Visa Europe and YapıKredi.
Alzetta, speaking to Today’s Zaman, when asked whether Visa Europe was planning to enter the corporate security market with this new card, underlined that “[Visa] is all about authentication, so this is a really good example of us providing authentication.” She also gave an example of the CodeSure card’s use as an enterprise security device, revealing that employees of Deloitte in the UK were using CodeSure cards from Barclays Bank to access Deloitte’s network.
