Fujitsu brings its SmartCity card into Asia-Pacific
- — 02 August, 1999 21:49
Fujitsu is bringing its SmartCity smartcard to the Asia-Pacific region to build on the vendor's success with the product in Europe, the company announced last week.
Originally developed by UK-based ICL, a member of the Fujitsu group, SmartCity has over 1.5 million cards in active use in 70 projects across Europe, Fujitsu said in a release issued late last week.
SmartCity is a multi-application card which supports multiple electronic purses, full transaction auditing and encryption, and open interfaces to legacy systems such as banks, Fujitsu said. Existing projects in Europe use SmartCity for applications including customer loyalty, electronic purse, bank cards, identity and access control, the vendor added.
Fujitsu said it will invest $US2 million in promoting SmartCity in the Asia-Pacific region outside Japan. The vendor believes that customers will most likely come from Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan and Australia.
About 30 million smartcards have so far been issued in Asia, according to the Asia-Pacific Smart Cards Association (APSCA), but true multi-application card projects are rare. The majority of existing schemes are based on single-application cards and used for simple transport, access control or telephony applications.
