Category: Featured Articles

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Smart Card Alliance Growth: Adding Resources for the Growing Industry This month the Smart Card Alliance unveils a new look for the monthly Smart Card Talk eNewsletter. Our goal with the new format is to provide our member and non-member subscribers with a brand new way of viewing the important smart card industry news, events,…

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Visa’s EMV and Mobile Payments Strategy Shakes Up the U.S. Smart Card Industry Events that shake and rattle the foundations of the U.S. smart card industry are rare events–almost as rare as the East Coast experiencing a 5.9 earthquake and a major hurricane in the same week. You have to go back to August 27,…

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Mobile Payments: A Mash-up of Technologies and Business Interests For Issuers, Mobile Operators, and Merchants Rarely has there ever been a time in history when someone could sit in a room of less than 30 people and watch an entire multi-billion dollar industry ecosystem unfold and reveal its inner secrets and uncertainties in an open…

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Competing Strategies for NFC Power Position Start To Come Into Focus The competing strategies for the power position in the world of NFC and the determined efforts to achieve an early advantage in the lucrative mobile payments market have started to come into focus. Last month’s flashy New York announcement by Google about the Google…

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Speculative Tension in Payments and Cybersecurity Summing up the essence of the 2011 Annual Conference: Roadmap to EMV Payments and Secure ID in a single word or phrase is difficult. What comes to mind is “speculative tension” over EMV and cybersecurity. Heightened market awareness about both topics and questions about when key market decisions will…

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Convergence Could Make Life Easier and Less Expensive The term “convergence” gets used a great deal in the smart card industry. Possibly that is due to the many commonalities that exist across the many seemingly distinct and independent markets where smart cards are becoming more and more mainstream in the United States. For example, what…

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Changes in the Payments Industry: Show Me the Money The anticipated announcements from the Federal Reserve pertaining to debit interchange fee limits and what considerations, if any, will be applied to those rates for issuers and merchants who meet new higher, yet to be defined, security standards are nearing. The speculation about what will happen…

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Mobile & Transit Payments Summit Proves “The Whole Can Be Greater Than the Sum of the Parts The expression “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” was evident this month in Salt Lake City at the 2011 Mobile & Transit Payments Summit. This mid-winter conference event always draws a modest, but very…

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Looking ahead at 2011 – Will It Be The Year of the NFC Mobile Device? My January 2011 letter is a look forward to what promises to be a very interesting year in the smart card industry and a preview of some of the important industry milestones on the horizon. Before looking ahead, let me…

Featured Content

Looking ahead at 2011 – Will It Be The Year of the NFC Mobile Device? My January 2011 letter is a look forward to what promises to be a very interesting year in the smart card industry and a preview of some of the important industry milestones on the horizon. Before looking ahead, let me…