INSIDE Contactless Launches MicroPass 4000 Contactless Chips

The unprecedented price/performance and low-power operation of the MicroPass 4000 product suite heralds a new era for contactless technology to move beyond payments to a broad range of high-convenience mass-market applications, including transit fare systems, access control, loyalty programs, as well as a host of lightweight identification applications.

The INSIDE MicroPass 4000 product suite has been built upon the award-winning and market-leading MicroPass L4-1G and L4-2G products, which have been utilized by more than 25 issuers to deploy more than 35 million cards in 2006 and 2007. The MicroPass 4000 intelligent payment platform was designed to optimally meet the high-volume, multi-payment brand and multi-application requirements of the U.S., Canadian and other contactless payment markets. The MicroPass 4002 supports the Discover Zip contactless payment application, while the dual-brand MicroPass 4003 supports both MasterCard and Visa contactless payment applications. The tight integration of INSIDE's native operating system and microprocessor hardware within the MicroPass platform, as well as the integral design, development and testing processes adopted by INSIDE, enable the rapid delivery of secure, high performance, and highly reliable products into the market. Flexible packaging options enable manufacturers to purchase MicroPass 4000 solutions in multiple configurations, including wafer, module, and inlay forms for use in card, fob, mobile handset, sticker, and ticket form factors.

"The MicroPass 4000 product suite gives INSIDE a powerful platform for future growth, providing a family of highly optimized and very scalable solutions for payment and other related application markets," said Charles Walton, executive vice president of payments for INSIDE Contactless. "We look forward to introducing several additional MicroPass 4000 family products later this year to support more payment applications as well as non-payment applications that are very well suited to this platform."

The MicroPass 4000 product suite shares a common architecture featuring a fast, low-power RISC microprocessor, advanced operating system, optimized hardware computing resources, and proven data management support capabilities. Each product is then configured to provide highly scalable solutions for very specific mass-market applications such as contactless payments, retail/gift cards, access control, transit, ID, or other emerging uses. Designed to be embedded in plastic credit and debit cards - in standard, mini, and fob form factors - so that a wave of the card is all that it takes to make a payment, the award-winning MicroPass platform assures reliable, convenient, and secure payment for issuers and their cardholders.

"Contactless is all about optimizing cost to reach big niche markets. The approach has to combine very straightforward programming with an IC cost that makes the solution practical," said George Peabody, director of emerging technologies, Mercator Advisory Group. "INSIDE takes a "right weight" approach that can give financial institutions and merchants the niche solutions they need without unnecessary development complexity and cost."

INSIDE also offers the MicroPass SDK to card manufacturers, terminal manufacturers, personalization bureaus, systems integrators, and issuers with in-house application development staff. The MicroPass SDK helps developers create retailer loyalty, transit, access, and simple ID applications, and incorporate those applications onto a MicroPass-enabled contactless payment card. These data applications provide a simple way of creating a value-added experience at the contactless point of acceptance and related access points.

MicroPass is used today to power contactless bank cards issued by more than 25 U.S. and Canadian issuers, along with cards deployed in Asia, Latin America, and Europe. MicroPass is the most broadly available core technology for contactless payments, with 20 card and fob products from major global and regional card manufacturers certified by the leading card brands. Contactless credit, debit, and pre-paid bank cards issued with MicroPass are today able to be used at locations such as McDonald's, Tim Horton's, 7-Eleven, CVS, Coca-Cola vending machines, New York City and Philadelphia taxi cabs, and more than 20 Major League Baseball and NFL stadiums in the U.S.