Emerging telecommunications needs of the card industry

THE CARD INDUSTRY offers a wide range of payment system products and services, including credit and charge cards, automatic-teller machine networks, interchange networks, debit card systems, authorization and processing services, and point-of-sale equipment. The trend in the industry is to extend automation in the forms of both on-line and off-line transactional systems to a vastly increased number of points of sale and to personal terminals in business and home locations. To this end, the industry is increasingly interested in interchange among proprietary and industry networks, traffic concentration and other facilities sharing arrangements, conversion of voice traffic to data traffic, use of cable television and other local-loop bypass options, integration of public packet-switched networks with private networks, and enhanced transactional security and authentication.