Smart Card Alliance Latin America Project

Recently, the Alliance staff has held organizing meetings with ITA field office personnel in Mexico and Brazil to discuss ways to bring smart card awareness and education to the government and commercial markets in those countries. The Alliance has also met with ITA personnel based in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and Miami who are in support roles and are prepared to assist the Alliances Latin American project. The Alliance has identified two industry conferences it will seek to participate in during the first half of 2005. The first is Cards 2005 in San Paulo, Brazil on April 4-6, 2005. This event has been a successful banking industry and related card technology and services show for ten years. A group from the Alliance and the ITA will attend this conference and introduce SCA Latin America to the vendors and card issuers who attend. Several high level meetings will be organized to generate support for the program moving forward. The second international opportunity is Security Mexico in Mexico City on May 11-12, 2005. The conference includes a broad range of security-related topics from homeland security to physical access control. We have proposed providing an educational symposium along with a panel session on smart cards to the conference organizers. Also, the ITA is organizing a USA pavilion for US companies to showcase their technology in Mexico at this event. All of these will lead up to the SCA Fall Annual Conference in Miami in October 2005 when the Alliance will host government and commercial leaders from Latin American countries for a special program and technology fair to bring the industry together in an open forum and information exchange. The Alliance is seeking current and new members interested in participating in the opportunities involving the SCA Latin America project described below to contact the Alliance main office at 1-800-556-6828 or via email to info@smartcardalliance.org.