Cosmobank, Taiwan has signed an order with Australian payments solutions company Keycorp for 100,000 Multos multi-application smart cards.
The deal is part of Keycorp's alliance with MasterCard, announced in December 2000, to rollout 15 million smartcards by 2003.
Cosmobank will begin distributing the new cards, featuring MasterCard's M/Chip credit/debit application, in July. Other applications, such as e-cash, loyalty and e-ticketing will be loaded at a later date says the bank.
"Cosmobank...intends to use these new technologies to expand our credit card market share in Taiwan — this is a revolution in the way we will conduct our card business in future," says Mr C C Hu, president, Cosmobank.
The smartcards feature a 16K chip and represent the first M/Chip implementation in Taiwan of Keycorp's Multos 4 multi-application operating system which is now available as a standard product on the Infineon platform.
"We are beginning to see an acceleration in the rollout of smartcards throughout Asia Pacific," says Jeff Portelli MasterCard International, senior vice president, product delivery, Asia Pacific.