ACI WorldWide Wins Award for Smart Card Management

ACIs chip card technologies, notably ACI Smart Chip Manager (SCM), support more than 20 million multiple-application cards on different operating systems and smart card platforms worldwide. Frost & Sullivans Global Smartcard Study detailing ACIs Market Excellence Award results was issued on 22 January 2004. Frost & Sullivan Market Excellence Awards pay tribute to the diligence and innovation required to implement a successful business plan and excel in the increasingly competitive global marketplace. The 2003 Market Excellence Award praises ACI Worldwide as the leading vendor of smart card issuing systems in the banking/financial services sector. ACIs card management software supports EMV credit and debit card issuing, account and merchant management. The Frost & Sullivan award not only recognises ACIs success in the financial smart card management market but also its competencies in the smart ID card market with ACIs involvement in large scale projects such as the Hong Kong smart identity card system (SMARTICS). The migration to smart cards in financial services is primarily driven by EMV mandates from MasterCard and Visa. To help issuers migrate to smart cards, ACI offers the modular ACI Smart Chip Manager to issue smart cards and manage life cycles, update application parameters including EMV risk parameters in the field, personalise any type of smart card and post issue new applications to multiple application card schemes. ACIs solution caters for the markets need to track smart cards from the point at which they are personalised in the production environment, or at the point of sale through the downloading of data, and gaining access rights or applications over the Internet or other networks. As such, Frost & Sullivan regards ACI as a threat to all vendors in the smart card system management market many of whom are small players offering only part of the solution. To select the leading vendor of smart card issuing systems in the banking/financial services sector, analysts at Frost & Sullivan conducted interviews with all market participants, closely tracked competitor revenue and market share within the industry and undertook extensive secondary research of proprietary data sources. Subsequent criteria including market awareness, revenue growth rates, and market and technology innovation were considered and contributed towards the final selection of ACI Worldwide. Twenty-two banks and processors have licensed ACI Smart Chip Manager for card and application management systems as part of their migration to EMV. These systems are in various project stages from start-ups to full deployment. The majority of these twenty-two banks, as well as a number of card personalisation bureaus, have either licensed or plan to license ACI Smart Chip Manager for a card personalisation management system. Success stories surrounding ACI Smart Chip Manager include Standard Bank of South Africa which licensed the product in June 2002 to issue and manage a large volume of smart cards to meet the issuing requirements of EMV. Since October 2002, ACI Smart Chip Manager has also been deployed to deliver the Hong Kong smart identity card system (SMARTICS). By July 2007, all 6.9 million Hong Kong citizens will have been issued a smart ID card, which equates to a daily issuing rate of 8,000 cards. Such critical business requirements of the SMARTICS project would not be satisfied without the extensive range of functions provided by Smart Chip Manager.