ELECTRONIC COMMERCE UPDATE

November/December € 1996

Netscape, CyberCash Form Technology and Marketing Relationship

Netscape Communications Corp. (Mountain View Calif.;www.home.netscape.com) and CyberCash Inc. (Reston, Va.; www.cybercash.com) have announced a technology and marketing relationship to broaden payment options for Internet consumers. As part of the agreement, CyberCash has licensed its CyberCoin Internet payment technology to Netscape. In turn, Netscape will bundle the CyberCash technology into future versions of Netscape products, including Netscape LivePayment server software for online payment processing.

The two companies will also collaborate on including future CyberCash payment services, such as CyberCash's electronic check services, into future Netscape commerce offerings. Netscape and CyberCash plan to jointly market these Internet payment solutions to consumers and businesses, and will work together on efforts to accelerate the deployment of Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) credit card payment protocol in the marketplace.

"We have had customer demand for small value payment technology, particularly from the professional information publishing industry," said Srivats Sampath, vice president of marketing for server, tools and applications at Netscape. "The integration of Cyber-Cash's CyberCoin with Netscape's commerce solutions provides our customers with a way to complete small transactions over the Internet."

CyberCoin is a payment service which permits online purchases for items costing between 25 cents and $10. This new payment solution offers merchants the opportunity to market low cost, high value items such as news and information, graphics, games and music. It also allows merchants to unbundle larger product offerings, and sell them in smaller increments. Financial institutions to offer the CyberCoin service include First Union, First USA , Michigan National Bank and First Data Corp.

Bundling CyberCash's CyberCoin technology into future releases of Netscape's LivePayment point-of-sale software will enable online businesses to accept multiple payment methods and implement new pricing and business models.

Netscape and CyberCash will coordinate their efforts on SET to assure interoperability between their credit card-related electronic commerce implementations.

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