The programme will be France's first large scale roll-out of chip cards featuring both contact and contactless payment applications.

CEDICAM, which personalises over nine million payment cards for the Credit Agricole regional banks each year, will use Cryptomathic's data preparation technology to generate the personalisation data - including all cryptographic data - for the dual-interface chip cards. To be issued to customers from March 2009 onwards, the new payment cards will enable the holder to benefit from France's growing contactless payment infrastructures for small value transactions.

Brigitte Charlier, Director Electronics Payments at CEDICAM, comments: "There have been many 'tap and go' payment technologies piloted but this will be the first large scale deployment of chip cards that offer both contact and contactless payment options. It is a groundbreaking project which would not have been realised without Cryptomathic's CardInk. The level of customisation and configuration that the solution offers ensures a highly secure environment for data generation and key management during the card issuing process, while its flexibility and effectiveness allows us to implement pioneering programmes such as this."

Guillaume Forget, Sales Manager at Cryptomathic, comments: "CEDICAM purchased the CardInk solution over seven years ago, and during this period we have worked together to continually evolve the technology to deliver innovative card products. We are delighted that Cedicam will utilise the capabilities of CardInk to issue a high volume of dual-interface cards. We look forward to continuing our partnership with CEDICAM to ensure that end users have a successful, smooth and secure transition to dual-interface payment cards."

Cryptomathic's CardInk is the only major system that is both Hardware Security Module (HSM) vendor and card platform independent, ensuring flexibility for any card issuing environment. With CardInk, al all data generation and preparation takes place inside a tamper resistant HSM, making it one of the safest solutions currently available.