News Release collected by Philip Andreae

www.andreae.com

News Release Captured
About Smart Cards
Around the World

After a time the news continues to show steady growth of the smart card deployment. New projects pop up everywhere with Transit, Government, Telecommunications, Payments and Mobile constituting the key buying groups. Mobile payments remain a dream in the USA while contactless is catching on everywhere. The struggle between Telco and Financial Services continue unabated as they continue to position their products as not yet being commodities. Time, distance, security, transaction processing and bytes represent the variables in everyone's revenue calculations. The holy grail is the interest and fee income that can be charged the cardholder and the merchant. The dilemma is that the complex interchange formulas cannot be proven to simply support the systems processing, fraud and cost of carry built into the original definition of interchange. They are now also incentives to help fund commercial cards, rewards programs and an assortment of other cardholder services.

Electronic PIN based debit conntiues to becoming common place and cheques continue to decline in harmony with the growth in electronic cash dispursement services, ACH processes, bank settlement procedures and proliferation of cards. Most recognise that the issue is making sure everyone agrees to a coherent approach to identify and message authenticity. The rest is about politics and carving up the market.

The Global migration to EMV is going at a pass that is comfortable to all stakeholders. Everyone who needs to be involved in pushing the trigger is mindful of the future risk of attacks on today's card and PIN based solutions. Fraud still is the barometer for triggering community action to cause corporations to invest in the the terminal and host upgrades.

It would be good if everyone: processors and switch providers in particular, was to commit to upgrade their gateway interfaces to support the various associations implementations of transaction level EMV support as part of the 2009 compliance upgrade. As equipment is replaced it should at least be PCI-PED offline and on-line compliant, EMV certified and ready to take the domestic customisations through terminal and key downloads and merchant inputs.

These same parties will be able to commit to growing the terminal base and develop the EMV device drivers based on available resources and market demand.

On the Mobile Banking front the issue is how to support. Do the Banks simply build web sites capable of being displayed on the primitive cell phone browsers and the more elegant smart phones using account and password verification. Or, is it an applet that must be resident in the menu of the phone and exploits all the capabilities of the phone. Used as the "Something I have" element of security. Being able to comfortably through the combination of possessing your phone with your chip inserted inside and ultimately a biometric - today a password, saying that is the assigned individual.

What transactions should be served is all those now available on the Corporations Internet portal.

Properly serving contactless (,200 mille second transaction limits) and Low Value Transactions represent the next milestone. Paypass and its competitors imitators have not yet proven that they are secure enough or can be properly priced to be cost effective. Let us not forget the idea of a purse or value store inside a Smart Card with Mondex being an interesting solution that can say it was successfully achieved. These solutions could once again emerge as chips and terminals appear.

Central repositories work in a fashion but do not create the ubiquity of an electronic cash replacement oriented solution.

20007 Smart Card News Releases