ICBC is China's largest bank, offering corporate and personal banking services to 2.72 million corporate customers and 170 million retail customers internationally. They were looking for a post-issuance card solution that would enable them to personalise cards services at both the regional and individual level through the upload of new smart card applications onto the cards after issuance. Following an extensive review and evaluation of the available solutions, Datacard Asia Pacific was selected to supply Aconite's Affina Enterprise as a part of their complete card management solution as it met ICBC's functional requirements and offered the desired levels of service and security.

"Providing innovative card products to their customers is of strategic importance to ICBC," said Patrick Regester, EVP Sales and Marketing at Aconite. "The bank has plans to roll out over 20 new applications in the near future, so it is vital that the chosen solution can be easily integrated within their existing infrastructure and is robust enough to cope with the high demands placed on it today and in the future. For those reasons, ICBC felt that Affina Enterprise was the ideal solution to manage their program of secure post-issuance and re-issuance application downloads."

Aconite's Affina Enterprise solution enables financial institutions to manage their portfolio of smart applications and devices down to the individual customer level, which results in improved customer satisfaction and profits for the card issuer. It is part of Aconite's award-winning portfolio of solutions and consultancy services that enables banks to migrate to the EMV (Chip & PIN) standard and to implement post-EMV solutions in the areas of risk and fraud management, contactless and prepaid applications and mobile payments. Aconite, who acquired the intellectual property rights to the Affina Enterprise Platform together with support and development staff from Datacard in July 2008, is responsiible for supplying the software and downstream development and support to existing and new customers in the banking, national and corporate ID markets.

Angus McDougall, Regional Vice President at Datacard Asia Pacific said "We are pleased to have been selected by ICBC to provide our smart card issuance and management solutions, alongside our partner Aconite Technology". He added "This is an excellent endorsement of the strength of our combined portfolio, and we are delighted to be working together to help banks in China to improve operational efficiencies and customer satisfaction through their chip card programs".