Thales e-Security today announced that TietoEnator, a leading IT services provider in the Nordic countries, has chosen P3, the leading solution for the smart card personalisation and preparation process from Thales e-Security, as its solution of choice when issuing EMV smart cards.
The first bank to benefit from the solution is Hansabank, one of the largest financial institutions in the Baltic countries, which issued its first Visa smart cards in August 2003.
Thales' P3 sits at the core of TietoEnator's EMV solution and helps simplify the smart card migration process by providing all the cryptographic data required. The key benefits of Thales' P3 are a secure data preparation process, 100% in-house control over cryptographic keys and limited impact on the banks' host systems. P3 is developed in conjunction with MasterCard and Visa and has been sold to smart card issuers and bureaux in more than 30 countries around the world.
TietoEnator provided the Estonia based Hansabank with a solution for issuing smart cards, including card authorisation message processing and EMV verification. In addition, the company provided consultation during the installation process. As part of the overall solution, P3 takes a file of cardholder data records, the same one the banks were using to issue magnetic stripe cards, and processes each record to produce the additional data required for smart cards. It then creates an output file containing all the necessary EMV data, which can be loaded onto the chip.
With this implementation, Thales e-Security and TietoEnator have taken an important step in the provision of EMV standard smart card processing infrastructure for the European banking sector. EMV migration in the Baltics is moving fast: the first EMV smart card in the Baltics was issued in December 2002, and banks have issued more than 200,000 cards until today. Given the size of domestic market, this figure ranks Baltic banking in the forefront of EMV migration in the Central and Eastern Europe.
Maris Ozolins, Senior Vice President for TietoEnator Banking and Finance, said: "We chose P3 for our EMV solution because of its reputation as a secure, reliable and easy to integrate product. This has been critical in the successful implementation at Hansabank and will ensure that our other Lithuanian bank customers are also successfully migrated to the new EMV standard."
Paul Meadowcroft, head of transaction security at Thales e-Security, said: "TietoEnator's selection of P3 to sit at the core of the cards issuance process underlines the dominance of this product within the market. As regions such as Eastern Europe, the Middle East and South America follow in the footsteps of Europe in migrating to EMV, we expect that P3 will be the solution of choice to provide secure and cost effective data preparation for the world's leading banks in an ever increasing number of countries."