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Executive Director’s Letter

Dear members and friends of the Alliance,

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 be made pushed Annual Conference attendance to a record 459 people, a 55% increase over 2010. Although the payments sessions outnumbered the identity and security sessions about two to one, both tracks had the audiences engaged from the start. It wasn’t just the size of the audience that was impressive, but the combination of very informed, high-level speakers and attendees who mixed it up with controversial (and sometimes opposing) viewpoints during the keynotes and panel sessions, in the open roundtable discussions, and during hotly debated Q&A sessions that followed each session.

What stood out for me was listening to Toni Merschen and Dave Birch, two of our keynote speakers and veteran European payments consultants, try to rationalize why the U.S. market has so far resisted the move to EMV and then to articulate, with equal measures of seriousness and humor, an objective outsider’s view of how completely out of synch the U.S. payments market is with the rest of the world. I thought the exchange over whether the U.S. should deploy chip & PIN, as the EU, UK, and Canada has done, or chip & signature, was especially captivating. The Walmart representative took the position that we need to authenticate the cardholder with a PIN or we have only solved half the fraud problem, while the Wells Fargo speaker (soon to be issuing EMV chip cards) argued that static PIN is a service nightmare and will ruin the consumer payments experience. If you expected that these two sides would agree on anything related to EMV, I think you learned firsthand that merchants and issuers have very different ideas about how EMV should be deployed. At least they both agree that, for EMV in some form, the time has come.

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SCALA Associate Director’s Letter

Dear SCALA–Smart Card Alliance Latin America Member and Friends,

I wanted to cover the topic of “value added” services in this month’s letter. The term is widely used by organizations in our industry in reference to the value chain. The term “value” refers to the concept of worth; when the term “value added” is used it means adding worth. In today’s society it is easy to confuse the term “value added” with profits or income. The confusion is not with the additional profits from goods and services generated, but with the belief that additional profits equate to the added value of those services to the market. During past years, organizations created confusion with these terms by stating that an increase in their profits demonstrated their added value to the market.

My past experiences have demonstrated that some governments and enterprises were focused solely on the increase of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) or profits and not on the “added value” to or well-being of their citizens and customers. In some cases, these public and private organizations destroyed their own wealth and sense of added value in the process of increasing profits. Countries are currently analyzing how they can reduce their budgets by reducing government services and increasing taxes, and therefore increasing their profits. Citizens would consider this approach a reduction in value, because they will now have to pay more to receive fewer government services. This may be the reason why all countries taking this approach are seeing massive protests. Another example is the famous case of an airline that increased their profits first by eliminating an olive, and later by eliminating the entire meal service for national flights. I don’t know of any frequent flyer who would prefer that airline over their full-service competitors, even on international flights. My last example is based on our own industry. After participating in several industry-related conferences, the events that have focused solely on the number of attendees and exhibitors have seen a significant decrease in both attendee and industry perceptions of the added value delivered by the event. Their numbers-based approach may affect the success of their future events.

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Member Profile

This month Smart Card Talk spoke with Keith Ward, director of enterprise security and identity management for Northrop Grumman. A 25+ year veteran, Keith is recognized as an information technology executive and has business management experience in leading, managing and developing complex mission critical enterprise programs and solutions.

Keith developed the strategic approach and led the remediation of the Cyber Security – across the Northrop Grumman Corporation (NGC) enterprise. He was responsible for the strategy, planning, resource management, engineering/solution development, implementation, and program management for enterprise provisioning, remote access, CertiPath and PKI, and the NGC OneBadge credentualing program.

Recognized as an expert on security and identity management in enterprise-wide mission-critical environments, Keith is a regular speaker at industry conferences including Aviaiton Week, AFCEA, RSA, Smart Card Alliance, the National Notary Association, Future Aerospace Congress and various U.S. DoD Identity and Cyber Crime Conferences.

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Feature of the Month

Getting to Meaningful Use and Beyond: How Smart Card Technology Can Support Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Records

One of the primary reasons smart card technology is positioned to become such an integral piece of the new healthcare technology landscape is because of its ability to assist in meeting meaningful use requirements: providing the technological capability needed for providing secure storage and access to electronic health records (EHRs), enhancing and improving EHR functionality and workflows, and ensuring security protocols meet and/or exceed the requirements of certification. This month’s article reviews how smart card technology can fulfill the security requirements of meaningful use and also address specific functional gaps in the offerings of existing EHR products on the market.

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Upcoming CSCIP Training and Exam Dates

Visit /activities-leap for registration information.

CSCIP Training & Exam Prep Course¹	CSCIP Exam	City, State, Country
June 2, 2011 (CSCIP/G only)	June 3, 2011	Gaithersburg, MD (Washington DC area)
June 13, 2011 (CSCIP only)	June 15, 2011	Niagara Falls, Ontario CANADA² (ACT Canada Cardware 2011)
June 22, 2011 (CSCIP only)	June 23, 2011	London, UNITED KINGDOM²
November 1, 2011 (CSCIP & CSCIP/G)	November 4, 2011	Washington, DC (Smart Cards in Government Conf)
November 14, 2011 (CSCIP only)	November 16 or 17	Paris, FRANCE² (Cartes & Identification 2011)
¹ This full day course is held from 9:00am–4:30pm at a location to be named in the city, state listed above. The cost for attending this course is $475 ($380 for members). ² International CSCIP training and exam pricing varies from standard pricing. Please contact [email protected] for further details.