Mellon Technologies and Proton World announced the signing of a license agreement to employ Proton Prisma as the smart card technology and infrastructure for the Balcard project, an EU co-funded project that officially started on Feb. 1, 2002.
The aim of project “BALCARD” is to develop a framework for low value cross-border transactions over the Internet through the use of smart cards. The project includes Balkan countries Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece and Romania. It is expected that the project will promote the adoption of business-to-consumer e-commerce in the Balkan region by offering a secure mechanism for online transactions.
The Balcard Consortium is headed by Mellon Technologies, a Greek electronic transaction systems provider, who will act as project coordinator for the following issuers: Eurobank Cards from Greece, Bulgarian Post Bank, JCC Payment Systems from Cyprus and Bank Post from Romania. Bulgaria’s national card payment operator Borica and French card manufacturer SchlumbergerSema are also members of the consortium, that wants to launch and test a prepaid card for secure cross-border Internet transactions in the Balkan. A large-scale pilot starting Q2, 2003 will be launched including a large number of cardholders and merchants (with on-line presence) in Greece and Bulgaria.
Balcard has selected Proton World as prime Technology Provider and took a license for the use of Proton Prisma multi-application smart card technology, including CALC on the card side and Matrix smart card management modules on the host side. Bulgarian Borica, who is also a Proton licensee, will be the integrator, responsible for swift installation and customisation of the Balcard Consortium test sites in neighbouring countries Greece and Romania as well as for Cyprus and in its own homeland Bulgaria. Borica will take on part of the development work based on the Proton Prisma specifications.
Balcard-partner SchlumbergerSema will supply the “Prismera” cards, which contain the EP (Embedded Profile) version of the Proton Prisma multi-application card. Apart from the successfully tested CEPS e-purse, which will be used in first instance in the Balcard project, the EP card also contains the Card and Application Life Cycle Manager, Proton World’s award-winning EMV PLUS credit/debit application and the Data File Manager, which allows the implementation of identification and loyalty applications.
“In Balcard we intend to demonstrate that prepaid smart cards can provide a secure means of payment to those Internet users that do not have a credit card or a bank account”, says Stefanos Karapetsis, Executive Director of Mellon Group. “It is an ambitious IST project including leading banks from 4 countries in the Balkan region. Partnering with Proton World, the world leader in e-purse solutions, is both a guarantee for the technological success of the pilot and a challenge for further developing smart card solutions in the region.”
Armand Linkens, CEO of Proton World, adds to this “Our involvement in the Balcard project is a great event: not only does it allow to confirm the strong market presence of Proton Prisma technology in the Eastern and Southern European countries, it will moreover be the first implementation for our CEPS e-purse in an environment for which it was conceived: the world of e-commerce and cross-border payment transactions.”
About Balcard
Extensive information about the Balcard Project and all the Balcard Consortium Members is available on the Balcard website: www.balcard.org. For more information please contact Stefanos Karapetsis, Mellon Group Executive Director At Mellon Technologies in Athens, Greece Telephone +30 10 3312500 or direct +3010372 7709 Fax +30 10 3223694 Email [email protected]
About Proton World
PROTON WORLD develops, licenses and delivers high security payment and identification smart card systems based on the market-leading Proton technology. There are Proton licensees in 35 countries: together they have so far installed over 700,000 terminals, where their 40 million cardholders perform millions of transactions each month. Building on the solid foundations of its expertise in and its extensive network throughout the banking and finance sector as provider of the world’s most frequently-used electronic purse technology, Proton World has developed Proton Prisma, a family of products that provides an infrastructure for secure multiple-application smart card programmes (debit, credit, domestic and interoperable purse, PKI and others), that offers issuers a wide choice of certified hardware vendors, simplified mass personalisation, dynamically-downloadable applications and multi-vendor card sourcing. Proton Prisma implements international smart card standards, such as CEPS, EMV and GlobalPlatform. Proton World’s headquarters are in Brussels, Belgium, with regional offices in the USA and Asia. Proton World is a member of the ERG Group, a global technology group, and specialist in transit and multi-application systems.
