Racal helped six million billpaying customers to benefit from local, easy and convenient access to the PayPoint bill payment network. This is made possible by completing the rollout of over 7,000 electronic payment terminals throughout the UK. The Racal CardMate terminals are used for processing customer account details and billing information from many of Britain's largest utilities and service companies including British Gas, BT, BBC TV Licensing, London Electricity and Anglian Water. The standalone systems accept smart card payments and have been processing such chip card transactions nationwide for the British Gas gas card over the last three months. The system also allows customers to charge their electricity meter keys and cards, make budget payments or pay their regular household bills in full. The completed network makes PayPoint the biggest retail smart card compatible network in the UK and the second largest store-in-store service proposition after the National Lottery.

*

HP kicks off proximity card at Reading FC

Hewlett-Packard and Reading Football Club announced the pilot launch of its proximity smart card for automatic stadium entry. The card has been issued to selected season ticket holders to replace the old voucher system and to speed up entry to the Madjeski stadium as part of the HP stadium solution. The new smart cards are the first of their kind to be used in this way in the UK. The nature of the smart cards means that all a holder has to do is to pass their card in front of the card-reader machine-- without having to take the card out of their wallets. The data stored on the ticket includes a "virtual ticket", that is 'collected' upon card submission. Information about the particular entrant is fed back to the central system, a feature that can help with security and crowd control, as well as gather attendance and loyalty statistics. The features that assist in security and crowd control can be extended so that a digital photograph of the card holder can be flashed up to a local PC screen at the instant the card is presented.

*

RSA takes on Europe

RSA Data Security, a wholly owned subsidiary of Security Dynamics Technologies, announced its new European-based sales and support organisation headquartered in Wokingham, England. The new organisation will play a major role in RSA's ongoing efforts to offer the rapidly expanding international marketplace products from a non-US source that are fully compatible with its industry standard encryption products. RSA's team of cryptography experts are offering for the first time, full-strength RSA encryption products to e-commerce developers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

*

Axent acquires PassGo Technologies

Axent Technologies has acquired UK-based PassGo Technologies. Under the terms of agreement, Axent expects to issue about 1,500,000 shares of PassGo stockholders and option holders, resulting in a transaction value of approximately $50 million. The acquisition strengthens Axent's ability to provide security solutions critical to the growing e-business market.

*

Crédit Mutuel to run e-Euro using Mondex