Source: Smart Payment Association
The Smart Payment Association (SPA), that brings together the largest payment smart cards manufacturers, completed its first internal market monitoring in order to get a better understanding of the actual situation and trends of the payment smart cards market.
Key findings:
- More than 340 million payment smart cards shipped in 2006, complying largely with the EMV standard.
- Dramatic increase of the share of DDA (Dynamic Data Authentication) within EMV cards - which more than doubled - to now represent more than 27% of all EMV cards shipped in Q4 2006.
- Open platform cards (comprising cards based on Java Card and Multos) now account for almost 10% of the global shipments.
- 12% of the cards shipped have their data storage capability enabled at issuance for value-added applications, such as: loyalty, access control, ticketing, etc. In order to standardize data storage, the SPA released last year a joint industry specification addressing cross vendor interoperability for contactless datastorage.
"The results of the first global payment cards market monitoring show a clear trend: the move of financial institutions towards higher value-added and more secure cards", said Jerome Ajdenbaum, President of the Smart Payment Association. "The dramatic acceleration of the conversion of Static Data Authentication to more secure Dynamic Data Authentication EMV cards and the growing share of cards enabled with data storage capability are the most concrete signs of this trend".