Whilst Visa developed CodeSure mostly in-house, Mastercard's Display Card technology has been developed in conjunction with NagraID security, part of the Kudeskli Group.
The card platform, which was unveiled at the Cartes 2010 event in Paris this week, is being billed at NagraID's fifth-generation card system.
According to NagraID, the platform is the first smart card in the world that connects the Gemalto-developed EMV payment chip to an embedded LCD display, a move that allows the chipset on the card to be interactively updated when it goes online.
This means, says the firm, that Mastercard users will be able interact with their payment card and access up-to-date vital account and payment-related information such as account balance, transactions history, reward points, payment due dates and a variety of other data that they would normally have to log on to their web account to view.
Infosecurity notes that these features were part of the facilities planned for the Mondex smart payment card system developed by NatWest Bank in the UK back in the 1990s and subsequently sold to Mastercard.
According to Cyril Lalo, NagraID's CEO, the Information Display Card – as it is known – is the most advanced payment display card.
"It can be considered as the Swiss army knife of payment cards", he said, adding that the card is the result of experience gained over the last five years since NagraID launched the first display cards in the world.
NagraID says that, each time the card is used in an ATM or standard POS terminal, the transaction authorisation request is routed to the issuer via the Mastercard network and replies back with a Mastercard EMV script as part of the authorisation response message.
The script is then executed by the terminal, which uploads the relevant information to the payment card.
The beauty of this technology, says the firm, is that it very easy to deploy and leverages the standard EMV investment by using the existing payment infrastructure and equipment.
As result, NagraID claims that context-specific alerts and marketing messages can now be delivered to cardholders cost-effectively and easily, whilst providing an enriched customer experience.
Plans call for Mastercard issuers to offer two flavours of cards to their customers: single, and multiple buttons with a touch keypad.