Canada's Interac Association has announced a partnership with INSIDE Contactless, the world leader in open-standard contactless chip technologies to develop chips containing the specifications for INTERAC’s contactless payment service. According to the companies, this partnership will enable Interac Association and its members to offer their debit card users a “next generation” retail payments solution. READ MORE

The Smart Payment Association (SPA), a group of the industry's largest manufacturers of payment smart cards, has announced findings from its 2008 market monitoring activity - undertaken in order to get a better understanding of the current status of the payment smart card market and its key trends.

"A lot of industries were severely affected by the financial crisis. Despite a slowdown in the SPA payment smart card shipments at the end of 2008, the smart card manufacturers are not as heavily impacted as others can be", said Marie-Jane Denis, President of the Smart Payment Association. "High volumes continue to be shipped around the world and a majority of regions carry on their migration to EMV standards." READ MORE

Slate's Big Money features a visual history of the credit card - starting all the way back with the Diners Club Card in 1951. [Hat tip: American Banker's BankThink blog].

EMVCo, the EMV standards body jointly owned by American Express, JCB, MasterCard and Visa, has announced that it will host an inaugural EMV User Meeting on 30 June-1 July 2009, at the Sheraton Arabellapark in Munich, Germany. Users of the EMV Specifications from across the world are invited to attend the meeting, and participate in technical discussions on the development of the EMV standard for future contact, contactless and mobile payments. READ MORE

NXP and Giesecke & Devrient have announced the introduction of NXP’s new Fast Pay contactless security chip and a new line of G&D contactless payment devices based on this IC. According to the two companies, "Fast Pay-based devices have been specifically designed to provide consumers in the USA and Canada with a convenient and swift contactless payment solution – replacing the need for cash and reducing transaction times." READ MORE

MasterCard Worldwide has announced the issuance of the 50 millionth MasterCard PayPass card or device. In the last year, the number of PayPass cards and devices more than doubled. According to MasterCard, "this significant PayPass momentum demonstrates not only the demand for simple solutions when it comes to payments, but also the continued secular shift toward electronic payments as validated by recent data1 that indicates 41 percent of consumers use cash less often today than they did two years ago." READ MORE

GlobalPlatform, the international specification body for smart card infrastructure, has announced that PayPal has become its latest member. According to the organization, "PayPal, the leading global online payments service, will bring its expertise to GlobalPlatform and contribute to the ongoing development of standards to ensure interoperability across the payments industry." READ MORE

ViVOtech has announced that it has closed an $8.6m extension to its Series C round of funding from its existing investors, bringing the total investment in its series C round to more than $40m. Separately, the company also announced that it has been awarded a key NFC-related software patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Patent number 7,469,151 was awarded on December 23rd 2008 and covers" a broad range of methods, systems and products for over the air (OTA) provisioning of credit, debit, prepaid, loyalty and other payment or non-payment cards into mobile phone devices through wireless networks or the internet." READ MORE

CGAP has published a white paper titled "Going Cashless at the Point of Sale: Hits and Misses in Developed Countries" by Ignacio Mas and Sarah Rotman. The paper explores a number of payment systems that have been tried and failed vs. those that have achieved some level of success. Includes discussion of Mondex, Octopus, Mobipay (Spain), Moneta (Korea), Simpay (Europe), and Osaifu-Keitai (Japan).

Moversa, a joint venture between NXP and Sony Corporation, has announced it will unveil its latest security chip – the Universal Secure Access Module (U-SAM) – at this year’s Mobile World Congress (16-19 February in Barcelona, Spain). According to the company, "the chip manages contactless smart card applications, regardless of protocols and operating systems, in Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled mobile devices. The potential of the U-SAM will be showcased on the NTT DOCOMO stand (Stand B117, Hall 8) in a demonstration featuring how multiple applications based on different contactless technologies, can be accessed on one mobile handset." READ MORE

EMVCo, the EMV standards body jointly owned by JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide and Visa Inc., has announced American Express as its fourth owner-member. According to the organization, "the addition of this latest international payment organisation aligns with EMVCo’s intent to attract further industry participation in the development of the EMV Specifications." READ MORE

Travis Pantin writes for The National that the Central Bank of Abu Dhabi has issued a statement requiring banks to introduce chip and PIN technology on their cards.

Steve Klebe writes:

I predict that when President-elect Obama is replaced by the next president in 2017 that will still be the case [we'll still be using mag stripe cards], albeit waning by that time. What do you think? Will we finally be issuing Chip Cards? Will it be RFID? Will it all be replaced by our mobile phones acting as payment cards or devices?

Gemalto has announced that its Ezio Pocket Reader is "the first fully certified reader made available to the market for MasterCard Advanced Authentication for Chip. The Advanced Authentication for Chip specification allows two-factor authentication on any EMV card already in use, whether or not it has been personalized according to the MasterCard Chip Authentication Program™ (CAP)." READ MORE

Dynamic Card Solutions reports that it is seeing very strong demand for unembossed "flat" card instant issuance among financial institutions. DCS says it has received orders for approximately 1,300 new FCP 20/20 flat card printers, which is powered by HID Global's High Definition Printing (HDP) technology. READ MORE

MasterCard and RATP have announced that "they are cooperating at developing the functional and technical requirements and feasibility of using MasterCard PayPass contactless payment cards to access public transport services." According to MasterCard, "the goal is to help French and foreign travellers gain faster access to public transportation by simply taping their MasterCard PayPass bank card in front of a validator. In association with la Banque Postale, lab and field tests could also be conducted in the course of 2009."

[Editor's note: Today seems to be the day for contactless transit payments - apparently the new "killer app" for contactless. Earlier, Visa also announced trials of its PayWave contactless payments as part of a strategy focusing on transit payments. Since widespread deployment contactless acceptance is a precursor to supporting local mobile payments, transit payments may be emerging as an ideal, high-frequency acceptance environment for mobile payments - as it has been in Japan for several years.] READ MORE

Gemalto has announced that it has equipped over 300 shopping malls worldwide with its Dexxis Instant Issuance solution, "enabling on-the-spot delivery of one million credit cards per year in total." READ MORE

Visa and U.S. Bancorp have announced a pilot program designed to test consumer preferences for an alternative electronic payment device, the Visa Micro Tag, the smallest Visa payWave-enabled device currently available. The U.S. Bank Visa Micro Tag easily attaches to a key ring and allows Micro Tag holders to simply wave and pay. READ MORE

Members of the Canadian payment card industry - Interac Association, MasterCard Canada, Inc., Visa Canada and many of their respective card issuers and payment processors - have released positive insight and observations from the industry trial of chip technology being conducted in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario. READ MORE

In its latest issue, the Economic Review published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City includes an article titled "Can Smart Cards Reduce Payments Fraud and Identity Theft?" by Richard J. Sullivan.

From the summary: "Sullivan explores why smart cards have the potential to provide strong payment authorization and thus put a substantial dent into the problems of payments fraud and identity theft. But adopting smart cards in the United States faces some significant challenges. First, the industry must adopt payment smart cards and their new security standards. Second, card issuers and others in the payments industry must agree on the specific forms of security protocols used in smart cards. In both steps the industry must overcome market incentives that can impede the adoption of payment smart cards or limit the strength of their security."

The SmartCard Alliance has announced a new white paper titled "What Makes a Smart Card Secure?" that was developed by the Smart Card Alliance Contactless and Mobile Payment Council’s Security Work Group "to provide an overview of smart card security features and other security designs inherent in smart card-based systems." READ MORE

Libercard, ViVOtech and Inteligensa have announced they have "collaborated to develop the first Transit & Retail combination contactless payment implementation in Latin America. With the new technology, Brazilians in the city of Fortaleza use a single contactless payment card to ride local transit and make retail purchases. Libercard has enabled tens of thousands of transit riders with dual-purpose prepaid contactless cards to ride transit, pay for purchases and perform top-ups at several hundred retail stores in Fortaleza that use ViVOtech contactless payment devices implemented with Inteligensa integration expertise." READ MORE

Visa has announced that it will begin supporting the issuance of "unembossed" cards in the U.S. for Visa consumer debit, business debit and consumer credit cards. READ MORE

The Smart Card Alliance has announced that its Contactless Payments Council will expand its focus to include the topics of Near Field Communications (NFC) and mobile payments - renaming itself to the Contactless and Mobile Payments Council. It also announced new officers and steering committee, recent achievements, and upcoming projects. READ MORE

In a press release, the Smart Card Alliance reports that "after two years of fast growth in contactless payments, the verdict is in: Once consumers try contactless, they like it! And with large issuers including American Express, Chase, Citibank, Washington Mutual, Wells Fargo and many others issuing contactless cards, the number of users is growing fast." READ MORE

Texas Instruments has announced the availability of a new secure multi-purpose contactless chip designed for the closed-loop contactless micropayment, loyalty, ID and access application markets. "TI's ISO/IEC 14443 Type B chip, called the RF-HCT-WRC5-KP221, combines processing speed, advanced radio frequency (RF) performance and industry-standard security with a flexible and configurable memory that supports up to five applications on one contactless card or token." READ MORE

Jo Best writes for Silicon.com about Barclays efforts in contactless cards in the UK - quoting the head of contactless card development as saying they'll have over a million contactless cards in the market soon. Over 5 million contactless cards in total are expected to have been issued in the UK by the end of this year. Contactless POS rollouts are continuing - moving beyond just the London area.

A new webinar series produced in partnership by the Smart Card Alliance and the Electronic Transactions Association (ETA) will hold its first webinar on the topic of "Smart Cards in Mobile Payment/Near Field Communications (NFC)" on September 25th from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. ET. Registration is available for the event at http://www.smartcardalliance.org/pages/activities-events-web-seminars. READ MORE

In an article today titled "US travelers face credit snafu", Eric Lucas writes for the Boston Globe about how the migration of countries around the world away from magnetic stripe cards to chip cards requiring PINs for acceptance is impacting some American travelers. While merchants in Chip and PIN markets are supposed to accept foreign mag stripe cards, Lucas personally found he couldn't use his US Visa card while traveling in Scandinavia this summer. His solution: "Cash usually works."

In an article titled "Could this chip have prevented the TJX breach?", Ross Kerber reports for the Boston Globe on an interview with TJX vice chairman Donald G. Campbell who is "urging banks and other retailers to embrace a multibillion-dollar technology that uses a tiny computer chip to stop criminals from using stolen debit and credit cards." He's also proposing that retailers, banks and the card companies share the costs of upgrading the US to a Chip and PIN card payments infrastructure. On his StorefrontBacktalk blog, Evan Schuman writes: "There's little question that both moves [Chip and PIN plus encrypted card data transmission] would improve security, but the cost and change required will also make them almost impossible to deploy."