- Email: [email protected]
ASK wins new orders in France
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news chip-based debit/credit bank cards. The cards are to be supplied by Giesecke & Devrient (G&D); they will offer the standard EMV international payment functions and also carry customer loyalty programmes. The first 20 000 cards are now being issued. “The starting gun has gone off in Germany for implementation of the card organizations' directive that all electronic payment cards worldwide are to be switched from magnetic-stripe to chip by 2005,” said a G&D spokesperson. Anton Lill, manager of direct banking products at DaimlerChrysler Bank said, “We have succeeded in completing this project in six months. Besides drivers of Chrysler, Jeep and ‘smart’, the credit card will also be offered to customers who do not drive a DaimlerChrysler vehicle. The MercedesCard will still be available exclusively to Mercedes drivers as before.” With more than 400 000 customers, DaimlerChrysler Bank's core activities are in leasing, financing, motor insurance and fleet management for the vehicle brands of the DaimlerChrysler Group. Dieter Bulle, manager of Payment Cards at G&D, said that the customer loyalty function enabled bonus points to be stored on the chip and read directly at the point of sale terminal. To produce the EMV cards, G&D has added a data generation and key management system to its production process. "This system enables us to generate chip data from magnetic-stripe data", explained Bulle. "By integrating this system into our card manufacturing process, we are now more independent of external data suppliers. In a further stage, data will be personalized with software developed by G&D.” Contact: Andrea Bockholt at Giesecke & Devrient, Tel: +49 89 41 19-2422, email: [email protected]
bank cards
EC softens competition rules for cross-border Visa card payments The European Commission has granted an exemption to EU competition rules to allow Visa member banks to continue charging retailers ‘interchange fees’ (MIF) on crossborder payments using Visa cards. The decision follows a year of discussion between the Commission and Visa; as a result of these discussions, Visa has agreed to reduce the 6
interchange fees in absolute terms, and to cap certain ‘relevant’ costs. The EC decision was strongly criticised by retailers across Europe. The British Retail Consortium said that the Commission had taken a decision that restricts competition. “It allows the banks to continue their anticompetitive price fixing cartel; this cannot be seen as being in the interests of businesses or of consumers trading cross-border in the EU,” said BRC Director General Bill Moyes. Mr Moyes added: “Commissioner Monti and his colleagues have missed an opportunity to help consumers across the EU by restricting competition in this area. While this exemption applies to only 10% of all Visa card transactions it does not sit well with the EU’s drive to encourage businesses to trade with consumers across borders.” The BRC has been a keen supporter of Eurocommerce, the Brussels-based international association of retailers and wholesalers, in its campaign to bring down the fees charged to retailers for processing card transactions; Eurocommerce says interchange fees are high because of the lack of competition in the bank card market. The EC decision will not, however, pre-empt any national decisions on MIFs for domestic payments. “This is good news for BRC,” said Bill Moyes, “since it is clear that the case we currently have against Europay/MasterCard, who have requested exemption from UK Competition legislation, should be unaffected. The [UK-based] Office of Fair Trading issued a provisional finding last year that the MasterCard interchange fees in the UK were anti-competitive and not capable of exemption.” Visa, not surprisingly, welcomed the EC decision as ‘a victory for consumers’, saying that its network relies on interchange fees to encourage the wider distribution and acceptance of cards and the services they provide. The Commission, for its part, says that the new levels of fees will significantly improve the situation for retailers and, ultimately, the consumer. Interchange fees are paid on each transaction by the card ‘accepting’ bank (which handles transactions for the retailer) to the card ‘issuing’ bank (where the cardholder has their account). The accepting bank, which handles the transaction and charges a fee to the merchant, is in effect paying a commission to the bank that issued the card in the first place — and has thus made it possible for the transaction to take place at all. Contact: David Southwell at British Retail Consortium, Tel: +44 20 7854 8924; email: [email protected] Fiona Wilkinson at Visa EU, Tel: +44 20 7795 5416; email: [email protected]
(See feature this issue: The interchange decision and its implications)
mass transit
ASK wins new orders in France Contactless smart card specialist ASK has won two new contracts — one from the ‘Centre’ region of France (which includes the city of Tours) and the second from the city of Grenoble. These awards follow a series of smart card contracts awarded to ASK in the past year; these amount in total to orders for more than 7 million contactless smart cards and tickets, for use in more than 35 automated fare collection (AFC) public transit ticketing and highway toll projects. Under the first of the new contracts, ASK will supply and personalize 80 000 dual interface contacted/contactless smart cards (the GTML and the CD97) to the Centre region. The cards are for use in the AFC system covering the 400 buses of the region, as well as in the regional trains; the system will be fully operational in October 2002. The three public transport organizations that operate this system are the city of Tours, the French Railway (SNCF) and the Indre et Loire local authority. In the second contract, ASK will provide the city of Grenoble with 90 000 dual interface GTML smart cards and 1000 GEN310 contactless couplers; these are to be integrated into fare readers and AFC system on buses and trains. The system will be fully implemented in November 2002. Both the GTML and the CD97 cards are based on microprocessor chips; they are dual interface cards (with both contactless and contacted interfaces). This enables the cards to work in contactless readers; this makes them faster to use as tickets; they will also work in insertion-style contact readers — typically at the point of sale or connected to PCs. This will make it possible to reload fare value to the cards at a wide range of terminals and eventually to carry non-transit applications. The typical read/write range is 4 inches (10 cm), and the cards comply with the ISO 14443 standard. The CD97 card includes 2 Kbytes of EEPROM memory, and is designed for combining a ticketing application with an electronic purse and one other application. The GTML card, which has 576 bytes of EEPROM memory, is a low cost card designed solely for ticketing applications. In April this year, ASK announced that the company had shipped more than two million of
Card Technology Today September 2002
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06/09/2002
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news its C.ticket contactless smart paper tickets. Using a patented printed antenna and an ultra-small ISO compliant smart card chip, C.ticket combines contactless smart card technology with the low cost of a paper ticket. Contact: Bruno Moreau at ASK, www.ask.fr
e-commerce
Merchants sign up for MasterCard authentication system Some 17 000 merchants belonging to the WorldPay multi-currency payment system are to use MasterCard’s UCAF authentication process for online transactions. The UCAF process transports cardholder data to a card-issuing bank involved in an online transaction using MasterCard (credit) and Maestro (debit) cards. The cardholder's identity will be verified at the issuing bank (by password, PIN, or other authentication techniques) and verification will be sent back to the merchant. The move enables merchants signed up with WorldPay to benefit from MasterCard’s new rules: under these rule changes, liability for fraudulent transactions (that have not been authorized by the cardholder) will be removed from the online merchant, provided that UCAF has been used. Until now, if an online merchant shipped goods for a transaction that turned out to be fraudulent (because the cardholder did not authorize the transaction) the merchant has ultimately borne the costs. The process should reduce incidences of online fraud, and encourage consumers and merchants to place and accept orders over the Internet. Based in Cambridge, UK, WorldPay has an Asia Pacific regional centre in Singapore and an Americas centre in Sterling, Virginia. The company also has operations in Germany and South Africa. Contact: Louise Herbert at MasterCard Europay, Tel: +32 2 352 5647, email: [email protected]
transport cards
New European trucks to be fitted with smart card readers In two years’ time, all new road transport vehicles in Europe will have to be fitted with a
Card Technology Today September 2002
digital tachograph that reads smart cards. The tachograph, mandated by the European Commission, will help enforce relevant safety legislation by recording the driving times and rest periods of professional drivers in road transport. The tachograph programme will launch a new market for several million microprocessor smart cards a year. While the existing analogue tachograph consists of a mechanically operated vehicle unit and paper record sheets, the new tachograph comprises a digital vehicle unit and a smart card issued by the member state in which the driver has his residence. The automatically registers the activity of the drivers and keeps the information for a year. The personal card that drivers must have in their possession will record and store details of their activities for the last 28 days. The new device is installed in the dashboard of the vehicle and has to record the time, speed and distance travelled. The digital tachograph will be menu-driven and cover such activities as driving, work, rest and availability. The vehicle registration number of the vehicle is also put into the memory and the tachograph must be able to download all selected data from the memory into a portable computer. There will be a small screen and a printer. Events and faults (power interruption, non-functioning card, speed excess, etc.) will be detected and there will be self-testing. Drivers will be warned if they exceed the continuous driving time limit. Police officers who conduct road checks will get their own cards, which they can insert into the reader’s second slot to access data both on the driver’s card and the recording equipment itself. Contact: European Commission at www.europa.eu.int
biometrics
Datacard adds Imagis systems to portfolio Imagis Technologies, a developer of facial recognition and other biometric systems, has signed an authorized reseller agreement with Datacard. Under the agreement, Datacard will include facial recognition technology from Imagis in its portfolio of secure identity solutions. Datacard’s ID products range from basic photo ID systems to identity networks that employ biometrics, smart cards and digital imaging technology. The two partners point out that in recent months, demand for identity solutions using biometrics and smart card technology has
in brief • The US Department of Defense (DoD) has selected middleware from Datakey to run PKI functions on its Common Access Card (CAC). Under the contract, Datakey will supply client software, software licences and maintenance support to support the DoD Common Access Card over a three-year period. Any DoD organization can order Datakey middleware under this contract, which was procured through the Naval Inventory Control Point, Mechanicsburg, PA, USA. • Maximus, one of the vendors selected by the US General Services Administration (GSA) for the Common Access Card (CAC) programme, has been awarded a $1.4 million contract to issue an Electronic Treasury Enterprise Card (E-TREC) for the Department of Treasury. The card will be issued to some 9000 employees from the Secret Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury departmental offices. The E-TREC cards will provide physical (contact and contactless) and logical access (computer/data access), biometrics, public key infrastructure (PKI), and sign-on functions. • Datakey has joined forces with Germanbased Utimaco to integrate smart card solutions and PKI. Datakey will now offer smart cards and client software carrying Utimaco's SafeGuard PKI and digital signature packages. SafeGuard PKI is the Reference Implementation in the EEMA's PKI Challenge project, a European PKI interoperability project that is sponsored by the European Commission (CTT August 2002, p. 4). Each company sees opportunities for its respective products in the other’s home marketplace. Electronic invoicing and the distribution of reports to customers are typical applications where the partners believe that Utimaco's Safeguard products can be combined with Datakey's smart card technology. • Applied Card Technologies (ACT) of the UK has launched an in-cab smart card reader for use in commercial vehicles. It is being rolled out to fuel management company CH Jones, which already supplies smart cards for use at the petrol pump, at the in-store pointof-sale and now in the vehicles themselves. The in-cab smart card reader recordings registration and mileage data for individual drivers and has been approved by the UK Tacho centre.
7
06/09/2002
19:15
Page 6
news chip-based debit/credit bank cards. The cards are to be supplied by Giesecke & Devrient (G&D); they will offer the standard EMV international payment functions and also carry customer loyalty programmes. The first 20 000 cards are now being issued. “The starting gun has gone off in Germany for implementation of the card organizations' directive that all electronic payment cards worldwide are to be switched from magnetic-stripe to chip by 2005,” said a G&D spokesperson. Anton Lill, manager of direct banking products at DaimlerChrysler Bank said, “We have succeeded in completing this project in six months. Besides drivers of Chrysler, Jeep and ‘smart’, the credit card will also be offered to customers who do not drive a DaimlerChrysler vehicle. The MercedesCard will still be available exclusively to Mercedes drivers as before.” With more than 400 000 customers, DaimlerChrysler Bank's core activities are in leasing, financing, motor insurance and fleet management for the vehicle brands of the DaimlerChrysler Group. Dieter Bulle, manager of Payment Cards at G&D, said that the customer loyalty function enabled bonus points to be stored on the chip and read directly at the point of sale terminal. To produce the EMV cards, G&D has added a data generation and key management system to its production process. "This system enables us to generate chip data from magnetic-stripe data", explained Bulle. "By integrating this system into our card manufacturing process, we are now more independent of external data suppliers. In a further stage, data will be personalized with software developed by G&D.” Contact: Andrea Bockholt at Giesecke & Devrient, Tel: +49 89 41 19-2422, email: [email protected]
bank cards
EC softens competition rules for cross-border Visa card payments The European Commission has granted an exemption to EU competition rules to allow Visa member banks to continue charging retailers ‘interchange fees’ (MIF) on crossborder payments using Visa cards. The decision follows a year of discussion between the Commission and Visa; as a result of these discussions, Visa has agreed to reduce the 6
interchange fees in absolute terms, and to cap certain ‘relevant’ costs. The EC decision was strongly criticised by retailers across Europe. The British Retail Consortium said that the Commission had taken a decision that restricts competition. “It allows the banks to continue their anticompetitive price fixing cartel; this cannot be seen as being in the interests of businesses or of consumers trading cross-border in the EU,” said BRC Director General Bill Moyes. Mr Moyes added: “Commissioner Monti and his colleagues have missed an opportunity to help consumers across the EU by restricting competition in this area. While this exemption applies to only 10% of all Visa card transactions it does not sit well with the EU’s drive to encourage businesses to trade with consumers across borders.” The BRC has been a keen supporter of Eurocommerce, the Brussels-based international association of retailers and wholesalers, in its campaign to bring down the fees charged to retailers for processing card transactions; Eurocommerce says interchange fees are high because of the lack of competition in the bank card market. The EC decision will not, however, pre-empt any national decisions on MIFs for domestic payments. “This is good news for BRC,” said Bill Moyes, “since it is clear that the case we currently have against Europay/MasterCard, who have requested exemption from UK Competition legislation, should be unaffected. The [UK-based] Office of Fair Trading issued a provisional finding last year that the MasterCard interchange fees in the UK were anti-competitive and not capable of exemption.” Visa, not surprisingly, welcomed the EC decision as ‘a victory for consumers’, saying that its network relies on interchange fees to encourage the wider distribution and acceptance of cards and the services they provide. The Commission, for its part, says that the new levels of fees will significantly improve the situation for retailers and, ultimately, the consumer. Interchange fees are paid on each transaction by the card ‘accepting’ bank (which handles transactions for the retailer) to the card ‘issuing’ bank (where the cardholder has their account). The accepting bank, which handles the transaction and charges a fee to the merchant, is in effect paying a commission to the bank that issued the card in the first place — and has thus made it possible for the transaction to take place at all. Contact: David Southwell at British Retail Consortium, Tel: +44 20 7854 8924; email: [email protected] Fiona Wilkinson at Visa EU, Tel: +44 20 7795 5416; email: [email protected]
(See feature this issue: The interchange decision and its implications)
mass transit
ASK wins new orders in France Contactless smart card specialist ASK has won two new contracts — one from the ‘Centre’ region of France (which includes the city of Tours) and the second from the city of Grenoble. These awards follow a series of smart card contracts awarded to ASK in the past year; these amount in total to orders for more than 7 million contactless smart cards and tickets, for use in more than 35 automated fare collection (AFC) public transit ticketing and highway toll projects. Under the first of the new contracts, ASK will supply and personalize 80 000 dual interface contacted/contactless smart cards (the GTML and the CD97) to the Centre region. The cards are for use in the AFC system covering the 400 buses of the region, as well as in the regional trains; the system will be fully operational in October 2002. The three public transport organizations that operate this system are the city of Tours, the French Railway (SNCF) and the Indre et Loire local authority. In the second contract, ASK will provide the city of Grenoble with 90 000 dual interface GTML smart cards and 1000 GEN310 contactless couplers; these are to be integrated into fare readers and AFC system on buses and trains. The system will be fully implemented in November 2002. Both the GTML and the CD97 cards are based on microprocessor chips; they are dual interface cards (with both contactless and contacted interfaces). This enables the cards to work in contactless readers; this makes them faster to use as tickets; they will also work in insertion-style contact readers — typically at the point of sale or connected to PCs. This will make it possible to reload fare value to the cards at a wide range of terminals and eventually to carry non-transit applications. The typical read/write range is 4 inches (10 cm), and the cards comply with the ISO 14443 standard. The CD97 card includes 2 Kbytes of EEPROM memory, and is designed for combining a ticketing application with an electronic purse and one other application. The GTML card, which has 576 bytes of EEPROM memory, is a low cost card designed solely for ticketing applications. In April this year, ASK announced that the company had shipped more than two million of
Card Technology Today September 2002
cttsept.qxd
06/09/2002
19:15
Page 7
news its C.ticket contactless smart paper tickets. Using a patented printed antenna and an ultra-small ISO compliant smart card chip, C.ticket combines contactless smart card technology with the low cost of a paper ticket. Contact: Bruno Moreau at ASK, www.ask.fr
e-commerce
Merchants sign up for MasterCard authentication system Some 17 000 merchants belonging to the WorldPay multi-currency payment system are to use MasterCard’s UCAF authentication process for online transactions. The UCAF process transports cardholder data to a card-issuing bank involved in an online transaction using MasterCard (credit) and Maestro (debit) cards. The cardholder's identity will be verified at the issuing bank (by password, PIN, or other authentication techniques) and verification will be sent back to the merchant. The move enables merchants signed up with WorldPay to benefit from MasterCard’s new rules: under these rule changes, liability for fraudulent transactions (that have not been authorized by the cardholder) will be removed from the online merchant, provided that UCAF has been used. Until now, if an online merchant shipped goods for a transaction that turned out to be fraudulent (because the cardholder did not authorize the transaction) the merchant has ultimately borne the costs. The process should reduce incidences of online fraud, and encourage consumers and merchants to place and accept orders over the Internet. Based in Cambridge, UK, WorldPay has an Asia Pacific regional centre in Singapore and an Americas centre in Sterling, Virginia. The company also has operations in Germany and South Africa. Contact: Louise Herbert at MasterCard Europay, Tel: +32 2 352 5647, email: [email protected]
transport cards
New European trucks to be fitted with smart card readers In two years’ time, all new road transport vehicles in Europe will have to be fitted with a
Card Technology Today September 2002
digital tachograph that reads smart cards. The tachograph, mandated by the European Commission, will help enforce relevant safety legislation by recording the driving times and rest periods of professional drivers in road transport. The tachograph programme will launch a new market for several million microprocessor smart cards a year. While the existing analogue tachograph consists of a mechanically operated vehicle unit and paper record sheets, the new tachograph comprises a digital vehicle unit and a smart card issued by the member state in which the driver has his residence. The automatically registers the activity of the drivers and keeps the information for a year. The personal card that drivers must have in their possession will record and store details of their activities for the last 28 days. The new device is installed in the dashboard of the vehicle and has to record the time, speed and distance travelled. The digital tachograph will be menu-driven and cover such activities as driving, work, rest and availability. The vehicle registration number of the vehicle is also put into the memory and the tachograph must be able to download all selected data from the memory into a portable computer. There will be a small screen and a printer. Events and faults (power interruption, non-functioning card, speed excess, etc.) will be detected and there will be self-testing. Drivers will be warned if they exceed the continuous driving time limit. Police officers who conduct road checks will get their own cards, which they can insert into the reader’s second slot to access data both on the driver’s card and the recording equipment itself. Contact: European Commission at www.europa.eu.int
biometrics
Datacard adds Imagis systems to portfolio Imagis Technologies, a developer of facial recognition and other biometric systems, has signed an authorized reseller agreement with Datacard. Under the agreement, Datacard will include facial recognition technology from Imagis in its portfolio of secure identity solutions. Datacard’s ID products range from basic photo ID systems to identity networks that employ biometrics, smart cards and digital imaging technology. The two partners point out that in recent months, demand for identity solutions using biometrics and smart card technology has
in brief • The US Department of Defense (DoD) has selected middleware from Datakey to run PKI functions on its Common Access Card (CAC). Under the contract, Datakey will supply client software, software licences and maintenance support to support the DoD Common Access Card over a three-year period. Any DoD organization can order Datakey middleware under this contract, which was procured through the Naval Inventory Control Point, Mechanicsburg, PA, USA. • Maximus, one of the vendors selected by the US General Services Administration (GSA) for the Common Access Card (CAC) programme, has been awarded a $1.4 million contract to issue an Electronic Treasury Enterprise Card (E-TREC) for the Department of Treasury. The card will be issued to some 9000 employees from the Secret Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury departmental offices. The E-TREC cards will provide physical (contact and contactless) and logical access (computer/data access), biometrics, public key infrastructure (PKI), and sign-on functions. • Datakey has joined forces with Germanbased Utimaco to integrate smart card solutions and PKI. Datakey will now offer smart cards and client software carrying Utimaco's SafeGuard PKI and digital signature packages. SafeGuard PKI is the Reference Implementation in the EEMA's PKI Challenge project, a European PKI interoperability project that is sponsored by the European Commission (CTT August 2002, p. 4). Each company sees opportunities for its respective products in the other’s home marketplace. Electronic invoicing and the distribution of reports to customers are typical applications where the partners believe that Utimaco's Safeguard products can be combined with Datakey's smart card technology. • Applied Card Technologies (ACT) of the UK has launched an in-cab smart card reader for use in commercial vehicles. It is being rolled out to fuel management company CH Jones, which already supplies smart cards for use at the petrol pump, at the in-store pointof-sale and now in the vehicles themselves. The in-cab smart card reader recordings registration and mileage data for individual drivers and has been approved by the UK Tacho centre.
7