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The Mobile World Congress is back! The industry is back! Some may remember the MWC was the first major event to be canceled in 2020 at the beginning of the Covid crisis. All participants now try to remember how things were in 2019 to make comparisons. The industry is glad to be meeting again, our usual suspects are all here, Thales, Idemia, Giesecke & Devrient, although some of them have reduced the means allocated for the MWC to the extent of only having meeting rooms. Numer

The rumor had already been running for a while: Advent, the investment fund that acquired OT and Morpho, and structured Idemia in 2017 would not keep it forever. Now, it is official! Or almost official: Reuters just published a report saying that Advent International was looking to sell Idemia for US$ 4.6 billion (EUR 4.05 billion). Advent is said to consider splitting the company in two, separating the "government business," valued at EUR 3 billion from the "enterprise busin

For years, many of us have considered a smartphone had all the needed features to be turned into a POS terminal: it has a large display, a keypad, communication capabilities and an NFC interface to interact with contactless cards. However, it took some time for the SoftPOS concept to come to life. The needed functions were first added on Android based smartphones, they are now coming to Apple's iPhones and iPads. The path was strewn with obstacles, not only in terms of securi

Diem, the latest incarnation of the stablecoin project launched by Facebook in 2019, just announced it is winding down and selling its assets to SilverGate Capital, a specialist in digital currencies, for US$ 182 million (EUR 161 million). One may remember the uproar triggered by the Libra announcement three years ago. Facebook, which now calls itself Meta, was positioning itself as a global cryptocurrency provider, with the goal to use its new currency to facilitate payment