With cyber laws also expected to see the light of day before the year-end, smart card solutions providers are very hopeful that it will encourage a clutch of banks and third party service providers to consider introducing smart cards for utilities such as bill payments, loyalty reward schemes, e-transactions and universal banking.

Bangalore-based Verifone India, a Hewlett-Packard division specialising in e-payment and complete smart card solutions, is already negotiating with a few large banks for a tie-up to introduce smart cards for universal banking.

"Such cards could initially be launched within a particular city limits and later extended to other city locations," said Verifone India country manager Atul Saran. "Once it comes into vogue, multiplebanks can issue their respective cards and as a cardholder, any bank's any branch can be used for a transaction by the customer," he added.

Saran, however, refused to divulge the names of the banks interested in embracing the technology. The announcements are likely to be made by the respective banks within three months.

A working committee set up by the RBI is vetting the uniform standard developed as part of a pilot project by half a dozen companies such as Verifone, Gemplus, Schulumberger, Aplab, Ascom and STMicroelectronics, along with IIT, Mumbai.

The committee has representatives from Indian Banking Association, Institute of Development and Research in Banking Technology, Citibank, SBI and Canara Bank, besides others and is expected to submit its report (approving the standard) by November.

The project, called SMARS (smart rupee system), was commissioned by RBI as far back as 1996. "The companies arrived at a common national standard for chip card payment defining the complete system end-to-endlast year after which it was adopted by SBI and Canara Bank who have issued some 1,500 cards within the IIT campus. We are looking at replicating the same at a much larger level now," said Saran.

Verifone has already executed a highly successful smart card project in Sri Lanka.

Similarly, Gemplus India, which along with Schlumberger and Orga, claims to have supplied almost all the GSM cards to Indian cellular companies, is now eager to move into non-telecom applications. According to Gemplus vice-president marketing Bratin Chakravorty, the company is talking to many non-telecom service and utility providers for possible tie-ups to increase its portfolio in India.

French major Schlumberger is also keen to tap the banking segment and is in talks with banks for e-payment solutions using 16 kilobyte smart cards.

The two-day conference on smart cards technology, applications and business opportunities, which opened here on Wednesday has attracted a lot of attention to the credit card sized plastic with amicrochip which can revolutionise the lifestyles in the new millennium.