Individual members chosen to serve as Board Officers for the next twelve months have also been announced.

Sebastien Tormos, Vice President of Marketing at Datacard Group, becomes GlobalPlatform's new Chairman. Mr Tormos will be supported by Marc Kekicheff, Senior Business Leader of Product Technologies at Visa Inc., who will be GlobalPlatform's Vice Chair for a fourth term. Yves Moulart - Director of Cards, Technology and Architecture within STMicroelectronics' Smart Card Products, Software Engineering division - has been re-elected to serve his second term as GlobalPlatform's Secretary/Treasurer.

Five Board seats were open to nominations from Full Members of GlobalPlatform to serve a two year term. The individuals elected to fill these seats are:

• Bob Beer, Business Consultant - Aconite
• Jean-Loup Depinay, Program Manager R&D Funding - Oberthur Card Systems
• Dominic Fedronic, Chief Technology Officer - ActivIdentity
• Eikazu Niwano, Senior Research Engineer, Service Integration Laboratories - NTT Corporation
• Uwe Wittig, Group Vice President, Cards & Services, Division Payment - Giesecke & Devrient.

One of the first duties of the new Board of Directors was to reappoint Shoji Taniguchi, Chief Marketing Specialist at Toshiba Corporation, to his position as Strategic Director. Mr. Taniguchi will maintain responsibility for positioning GlobalPlatform in key Japanese and Asian government initiatives.

Sebastien Tormos comments: "It is a privilege to be elected Chairman of GlobalPlatform especially as it enters its tenth year of operation as an independent member-driven organization. I would like to welcome all new and returning Directors and extend sincere thanks to our members at all levels for their continued support and commitment.

"Over the last twelve months, GlobalPlatform has welcomed nine new members and launched significant technical advvances including a Confidential Card Content Management Amendment to Card Specification v2.2, a Device Application Security Management (DASM) Specification and a GPD/STIP Test Plan. With more than 305 million GlobalPlatform-compliant cards deployed worldwide plus an estimated two billion mid-range USIM/SIM cards using its card technology, the Board is looking to engage with the membership and the industry as a whole to grow these figures even further in the months to come and drive the adoption of fully interoperable standards across the entire smart card infrastructure."