Escrow in the charter

Hi Mountie,

On the call on Monday we talked about adding an escrow standard as an
optional deliverable of the charter. This was based on the inclusion of the
card standard and your point that for the majority of payments in the East
the payment scheme is escrow based as opposed to via a card scheme.

Before we do this I want to explain a little more clearly why I think
having a card standard is valuable and then you can tell us if the same
motivators exist for escrow.

Card payments are already standardized to some extent today. (For examle
ISO 7812 defines the format of a card number:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_7812). When a user pays by card there
are a lot of elements of the process that are common irrespective of the
card scheme. Example: You provide a PAN, expiry date, cardholder name and
usually a CVV. The data is submitted to a payment processor who processes
the payment per the rules of the scheme and returns a result to the calling
application.

IMPORTANT: Even though there are a lot of *different* domestic and
international card networks (VISA, MasterCard, Amex, Discover, UnionPay,
etc) there is a pretty standardised process to make payments using cards
from all of these networks.

So, why would we want to propose a standard for card payments that is a
specialisation of the Web Payments standard?

The Web Payments standard will radically change how payments are done on
the Web. Payments should become a LOT simpler and users will get used to
the idea of having a wallet service(s) where they register/configure their
payment instruments and when they need to make payments they will simply
get a prompt to confirm the details and then the process will be over.

The proposal for the standard is that the messages exchanged between the
payee application and payer wallet will list payment instruments that can
be used to complete the payment. In the card payment scenario there are two
ways this could happen:

Scenario 1: No card payment standard


   - The list of supported payment instruments contains a separate
   instrument for each card scheme that is supported. Example: VISA Electron,
   VISA Debit, MasterCard, Maestro etc.
   - Each scheme defines a different format for the payment initiation
   response message. Example: VISA may require the wallet to fetch a single
   use token from some third-parry service but MasterCard requires the actual
   card-number is sent in the response encrypted with the payee's public key.
   - The payment processor implements the appropriate processing logic for
   each card scheme.

Scenario 2: A standard card payment specialisation of Web Payments

   - All supported card payment schemes are listed under a single generic
   instrument called "card" or similar.
   - There is a standardised format for the payment initiation response
   (probably leveraging ideas from the EMVCo tokenisation specification)
   - The payment processor implements the standard card processing logic
   once and is able to support any cards that they have acquiring capabilities
   for

So, can we replicate this with escrow?

   1. Is the flow for an escrow payment standardised in any way or at list
   similar across the various escrow providers?
   2. Does it make sense to have a generic "escrow" payment instrument that
   standardises the messages for payments initiataion and completion?
   3. Would it be likely for all of the escrow services to implement this
   standard? Can we expect them to contribute to the standard?

I'm happy to help capture this into the charter if you think it's worth
doing, let me know.

Adrian