Intranet Systems Inc. announced June 4 that it will start distributing software for an advanced electronic banking system in Japan in late August.

The payment system, developed by U.S. company Maithean Inc., is compliant with the Secure Electronic Transactions standard defined by Visa and MasterCard. The company said under the NetPay Payment System the identification of a card user and the validity of the credit card will be checked by a third party called the "certificate authority." After identifying the card user, the authority gives him a certificate, which enables on-Net merchants to make certain that their customer and the card holder are the same person. All the information exchanged on the Internet will be securely encrypted, the company said.

"In Japan, shopping on the Internet hasn't been as common as in the United Stated," said Osamu Yamamoto, president of Intranet Systems. "(To boost Internet shopping in Japan) we need to introduce more secure tools."

Said Mark Wolfe, president of Maithean Inc: "We are the first to introduce a Japanese-language version of the comprehensive SET payment system." Wolfe said that a function which allows Japanese consumers to pay at the time of bonus payments was specially added in the Japanese version of the system.