Speaking to a small audience on Tuesday evening at the London conference, Riten Gohil, Visa's senior manager for payment authentication, revealed that the CodeSure initiative is gathering pace, with a number of European banks involved in commercial trials.
Gohil noted that Yapi Kredi, Turkey's third-largest bank, has been trialling the CodeSure card system for a number of months and is sufficiently pleased with the results that a commercial rollout is imminent.
"We're still at least two years away from a UK rollout", he told Infosecurity, adding that Visa is already in extended discussions with most of the UK banks and card issuers.
So how does CodeSure work? In a nutshell, thanks to its onboard numeric keypad and LCD display, it can operate in five modes - as an interactive extension to the Verified by Visa program; as an interactive authenticator for online banking; as an authenticator for telephone banking; as an authenticator for online purchases; and as a regular payment/cash withdrawal card.
In use, the card operates as a regular Visa card but, when a cardholder not present transaction is requested, the bank generates a challenge code to the cardholder, either on the internet or over the phone, and the cardholder inputs this code into the keypad.
The card then returns a reply code, which authenticates the user as having the card in their possession, rather than simply using a cloned card or having stolen the card data.
Each CodeSure card costs about £6.00 to make, but the savings in fraud greatly offset the cost, says Gohil, who added that, in a French trial, cardholders said that they would be happy to pay one euro a month for the card.
"And with a typical card lifetime of three years, you begin to see the potential for this card system", he said.
It's not all wine and roses for the card, which can also double up as a company VPN authenticator, as Gohil said that 18% of French trial users said they did not use it for online banking, as other forms of authentication were easier to use.
"The French survey also revealed that 28% are looking for a contactless card interface" he added, noting that, as a result of this feedback, Visa is working on integrating Visa PayWave (Visa's contactless system) into the card structure.