GlobalPlatform®, the organization which standardizes the management of applications on secure chip technology, has announced its Board of Directors for fiscal year 2015, following closely contested annual elections for six of the eleven Board seats.
Senior Business Leader of Chip Innovation at Visa Inc., Mark Kekicheff retains his position as Chairman for the fifth consecutive year. He will be supported on the Executive Committee by Uwe Wittig – Group Vice-President within the Mobile Security Business Unit at Giesecke & Devrient – who will continue to undertake the role of Vice-Chair, and Yves Moulart – Director of Development and Innovation within ST Microelectronic's Secure MCUs Division, Integrated Secure Solutions – who has been re-elected as GlobalPlatform's Secretary / Treasurer.
Six Board seats were open in the election with each individual appointed to serve a two year term. In addition to Marc Kekicheff and Uwe Wittig, Jon Geater – CTO at Trustonic and Chair of GlobalPlatform's Security Task Force – was re-elected as a Board member, alongside Eikazu Niwano – Producer in the R&D Planning Department of NTT Corporation and GlobalPlatform Japan Task Force Chair – who has served on the GlobalPlatform Board since 2005.
The Board welcomes two new representatives to fulfil the remaining seats, Mario Ivkovic – Senior Engineering Manager at NXP – and Gang Lian – Device Security Expert at Huawei.
Mark Kekicheff comments: "As we enter our 16th year in operation, we are delighted to witness ongoing engagement in our work from the GlobalPlatform membership and a continued desire to steer the strategic future of the body. With membership growing year-on-year it is clear that GlobalPlatform is more relevant than ever before in a marketplace that is welcoming new players and becoming increasingly diverse and sophisticated.
"It is important to remember that our work enables service providers to develop products once and deploy across the widest range of technology, such as smart cards, secure elements, mobile devices, set-top boxes, wearables and the internet-of-things. Those that have adopted GlobalPlatform's oppen and freely available standardized infrastructure benefit from having products which are compatible and scalable to future market updates."
Looking at the year ahead, Marc highlights that getting many industry leading experts engaged in GlobalPlatform's work will ensure all potential market opportunities are optimized. He adds: "GlobalPlatform understands that each market sector and region faces unique challenges and has therefore set-up a number of task forces to identify, analyze and address these issues. In 2015 these groups will be instrumental as GlobalPlatform continues to advance its technical specifications to support the deployment and management of multiple applications on secure chip platforms of any form factor. We will also continue to drive our functional compliance and security certification programs to ensure clear standards are implemented."
To support its technical work and ever-expanding compliance program, GlobalPlatform will be releasing a number of white papers and hosting seminars globally to share knowledge on the benefits of standardizing the trusted execution environment, secure elements and the messaging that needs to take place between these parties to securely communicate.