MasterCard's US$1.99 multi-application smart cards

MasterCard has announced that a number of technology vendors are supporting its $1.99 multi-application smart card initiative.

MasterCard first introduced its MULTOS-based multi-application smart card under its US$2.99 chip program in December 2000. Now, MasterCard has brought down the price of its state of the art, 16K multi-application MULTOS card by 33 percent to US$1.99. The US$1.99 card contains MasterCard's EMV compliant M/Chip credit/debit application, Mondex e-cash, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) file storage and PKI identification applications built into the chip, ready for enablement as required by MasterCard's member financial institutions. The ability to offer these high specification smart cards at such a competitive price was made possible by the increasing numbers of such cards being issued.