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People who love to complain have lots of opportunities to do so with the European payment market: everything is dominated by large financial institutions, we lack a European payment scheme, Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) may lead to losing some sales, innovation is slow, etc. In addition, not only the interchange level is low, but it is even decreasing: Mastercard and Visa just agreed to significantly reduce (on average by around 40%) their multilateral interchange fees

The European Union is working on a new set of specifications for ID cards of its member states. The specification is set to be aligned on the ICAO MRTD (Machine Readable Travel Documents) one for passports. Announcing an aggressive planning, the European Parliament expects member states to start issuing new ID documents within the next two years, replacing the existing 250 different types of ID cards currently issued by the European member states issued to their citizens and

Photo credit: Apple For long many companies from diverse horizons have been trying to enter the financial transactions arena. Apple is perhaps one of the best example of a long series of attempts to become a payment stakeholder. The latest embodiment in this series is the Apple credit card announcement. Already since the inception of the App Store, Apple has been collecting and keeping credit card numbers of its customers. Then, in our secure transactions industry, we all rem

Deal done! The EUR 4.8 billion acquisition of Gemalto by Thales, which was originally announced in December 2017 is finally completed! The companies just announced that, as of March 28, 2019, approximately 85.58% of the Gemalto shares have been tendered to Thales’ offer. Consequently, Gemalto is consolidated as of 1 April 2019 in Thales’s financial statements. Thales will acquire the outstanding shares and Gemalto will be delisted from Euronext Amsterdam and Euronext Paris. G