Earlier this year Visa agreed that, from 1 April 2002, the liability for online card fraud would no longer be the responsibility of any retailer that had signed up to Verified by Visa. Instead the liability would belong to the issuing banks.

Jon Prideaux, executive vice president, Visa EU, comments: "The Verified by Visa Issuer Service provides an immediate, low cost means of implementation for issuers and will help ease the start-up burdens of setting up the service independently."

Visa has partnered BT Ignite, BT's broadband solutions business, to deliver VbVIS from one of its secure data centres, on an application service provider basis. The new service is based on Arcot Systems' TransFort real-time authentication solution, designed to enable Visa member banks and card issuers to validate the cardholder's identity during an online transaction.

The service is issuer-branded so it appears as a service offered by the issuer to their cardholders. Issuing banks pre-enrol cardholders with Visa, who then informs them of their opportunity to sign up to the Verified by Visa authentication payment system. Cardholders visit the Verified by Visa Web site and, as their security background information has been pre-registered by their bank, they need only choose a personal security password to be instantly enrolled. In future, whenever they purchase online, they will be required to enter their password to verify their identity before their bank can authorise payment to the retailer.

Corner Banca in Switzerland is the first issuer to implement Verified by Visa in the EU through VbVIS.

Giovanni Bettoni, Internet manager, Corner Banca, says: "Signing up to VbVIS...means we can offer our customers the security and peace of mind of paying online through Verified by Visa and VbVIS is the most straightforward, cost effective means for us to do this."