The banking sector in Saudi Arabia consists of 13 banks, who have issued in excess of 10 million debit cards to date. These were magnetic stripe cards with a domestic debit application. As the banking world migrates towards EMV, it has been necessary for the banks in Saudi Arabia to support a Domestic Debit application on the new EMV cards.

The Saudi British Bank (SABB) has been working together with Bell ID to address this issue. SABB will be one of the first banks in Saudi Arabia to issue GlobalPlatform Java EMV cards which use the debit application for domestic transactions, with MasterCard and VISA applications for international transactions.

Bell ID's ANDiS4EMV solution is a sophisticated smart card management system that manages the EMV cards, their applications and associated cryptographic keys from data preparation through to post-issuance personalisation.

David Orme, CEO at Bell ID, added: "We are delighted that we are able to bring together the ANDiS4EMV solution and the domestic debit application as part of this project for SABB. We will continue to work closely with them and look forward to providing additional features such as contactless and mobile payments in the near future."

In addition to the migration to EMV cards, SABB will soon be able to issue new enabled and PIN-protected EMV credit and debit cards from their own branches through Bell ID's instant branch issuance capability.