SA`s major financial institutions are accelerating their preparations to enable a mass roll-out of EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) compliant smart cards.
In the past six months, secure e-payments company Prism Holdings has delivered and implemented Thales e-security EMV Host Security Modules (HSMs) and EMV Smart Card Personalisation software valued at over R4.5 million to SA`s major banks.
"And we expect to double this figure by the end of June this year as the move to chip technology steps up a gear," says Gerhard Claassen, Managing Director of the Crypto Business Unit at Prism, which represents Thales in SA.
The EMV standard was developed by a joint industry workgroup to facilitate the introduction of chip/smart card technology into the international payment systems environment. The local banking and retail sector is expected to be fully EMV-ready by 2005.
According to Claassen, the Thales HSM is the only a physically secure, tamper-resistant security server accepted throughout the financial industry. It provides cryptographic functions to secure transactions in retail financial applications including PIN encryption and verification, debit card validation, stored value card issuing and processing, chip card issuing and processing, message authentication and symmetric key management.
In addition, when acting as a peripheral to a host computer, the HSM provides the cryptographic facilities needed to implement the wide range of data security tasks including those required in Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) systems; Electronic Funds Transfer at point-of-sale (EFTPOS) systems; Financial Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems and Internet Commerce. Thales` EMV smart card personalisation system is designed to either reduce or eliminate the need for card issuers (banks) to alter their existing magnetic stripe-based card management systems when issuing smart cards to customers. It produces composite files in a format ready for the creation of personalised chip cards.
"Indeed, this system provides card issuing banks with a simple, future proof personalisation path to smart cards by easily integrating with legacy systems. It offers them a complete solution for the generation of all cryptographic data required to be written to a smart card as well as the additional data required for EMV compliance standards.
"This will make it a relatively simple task for the banks to migrate their existing magnetic stripe card holders to chip cards," Claassen concludes.
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JSE-listed Prism Holdings is a world leader in the secure electronic transaction market. With a growing presence in Europe and South-East Asia, Prism is one of the few companies in the world offering services solutions and products that bridge the following core technologies:
* Security - sophisticated cryptographic security solutions, many developed using own intellectual property resources;
* Payment solutions in the physical and virtual (Internet and wireless) realms; and
* Smart card technologies spanning both wireless communications and electronic payments.
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