Smart card manufacturer Giesecke & Devrient has launched its next generation of contactless payment cards, specifically for US bank card issuers, that incorporate both the MasterCard PayPass and Visa Contactless payment applications.
The cards will use a new StarCL contactless platform that offers the potential to achieve mass-scale deployment. This platform will also provide bank card issuers with a platform that has a major payment brand contactless applications loaded onto the card. The selection, either MasterCard PayPass or Visa Contactless is performed during the card pre-personalization or initialization process.
G&D’s StarCL v2 offers full MasterCard PayPass and Visa Contactless compliance, faster contactless payment transaction times, and reduced internal power consumption for greater reliability and product life. The platform also features a built-in multi-application development environment to facilitate the deployment of value-added retail, loyalty, transit, and access control applications, along with core payment processing.
The latest generation of Inside’s MicroPass intelligent hardware platform has been designed to provide G&D with a multi-brand, multi-application platform with improved performance features, said Didier Serra, Inside Contactless’ general manager and executive vice president of sales for North America. G&D is one of the world’s leading contactless card manufacturers, and we are pleased to build upon our 2006 successes as we support their operations in 2007.
The new G&D StarCL v2 cards will be available in March 2007.