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Smart Insights Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the smart card industry, its businesses, its technologies, and of course, its markets as well as its technology suppliers. Smart Insights covers all the major trends in the industry, it encompasses worldwide business, public and private standardization bodies, industry analysts and also the people belonging to the Smart Card Industry community.

Smart Insights Reports cover the smart card or secure transaction industry. They are industry reports covering a technology, a geographical area or a major issue in the industry. Smart Insights Reports include qualitative and quantitative analysis. They are built on a combination of primary research and secondary research, supported by an intimate knowledge thanks to years of experience in the smart card industry.

Smart Insights publications are brought to you by Thierry Spanjaard who has more than 20 years experience in the industry, in a variety of positions.

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The roll-out of Germany’s national e-health smart card has been put on hold, with a review to be carried out of security and confidentiality. The project had been hailed as the most extensive e-health communication project in the world.

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Cryptography Research (CRI) announced that in 2009, more than 4.5 billion security chips were manufactured under license to CRI’s semiconductor security technologies. The company’s business and technical growth in 2009 result from long-term investments in developing solutions to challenging and costly security and piracy challenges. Since mid-2008, Cryptography Research has signed a series of agreements with semiconductor vendors and other important stakeholders in the smart card industry value chain. Cryptography Research licensees include : Infineon (cf. Smart Insights Weekly #08-38), Renesas, (cf. SIW #08-39), NXP (cf. SIW 08-46), MasterCard (cf. SIW 09-21), Samsung Electronics (cf. SIW #09-25), Inside Contactless, Atmel, and EM Microelectronic – Marin (cf. SIW 09-37), and ST Microelectronics (cf. SIW 09-48). Also in 2009, MasterCard began requiring that its suppliers have a license from CRI. CRI says its licensed DPA countermeasures are now found in more than 95% of smart cards produced annually.

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Oberthur Technologies, claiming it is the #1 provider of smart credentials to the US Federal government, continues to provide FIPS 201 compliant Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards for the fourth year in a row after winning two new government contracts - bringing the company's total number of Federal Government agencies to 100.

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NXP Semiconductors announced that its Identification Business has reached a major milestone, having shipped over 500 million SmartMX security chips. Since the product launched in 2001, NXP‘s SmartMX chips have been incorporated into a variety of contact and contactless applications which require strong layers of security at the hardware and software level, including payment and bank cards, access management schemes, mass transit infrastructures, device authentication and eGovernment solutions such as ePassports, driver licenses, national ID and health cards.

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This week the industry is heavily discussing the recent reports that some German payment cardholders were unable to use their payment cards supplied by Gemalto after the turn of the New Year.

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The business and assets of Card Data Management Limited, which trades as ID Data, have been acquired by The TALL Group of Companies.

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Fonelabs, a Malaysian handset manufacturer (cf. Smart Insights Weekly #09-09), announced the beginning of mass production of its X-Series NFC phones by the end of December 2009. The company expects to sell more than two million NFC equipped handsets in 2010. All Fonelabs handsets support NFC and have the ability to perform peer-to-peer and tag reading functions out of the box.

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Giesecke & Devrient has embarked on a collaboration with two manufacturers of M2M modules: SIMCOM and u-blox. These companies have incorporated special SIMs – developed by G&D for the M2M market – as an integral part of several of their products.

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Gemalto announced that they have entered into exclusive negotiations with the objective to complete the acquisition by Gemalto of the Xiring banking activity. The proposed transaction concerns all of the current activities of the banking business unit of Xiring, with all the associated products, IP and technologies, as dedicated to EMV based strong authentication solutions for e-banking and e-commerce. The transaction is expected to be completed by year end.

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In a reaction to marketshare losses and shrinking margins, Nokia just launched a series of actions aiming at reducing expenses by concentrating on the company’s core business.

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