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History and development of the smart
card
It has
been about 100 years since large American department stores
first introduced
customer loyalty cards. Sixty years later,
the first magnetic cards appeared on the market. In 1968,
in Hamburg, Germany, Jürgen Dethloff developed the fundamental
principles of the smart card and patented them. Americans,
Japanese and Austrians later registered a variety of other
patents. In 1972, in Paris, France, the inventor Roland
Moreno created the company Innovatron: the principle task
was to sell ideas to those who lacked them. As reported
in one of his biographies, the company did not have a lot
of clients, but a lot of ideas, and the first patents on
the memory card were registered in 1974 and finalized on
March 17th 1975. After many developments, and
presentation after presentation to industry, businessmen
and bankers, the smart card woke the interest of a lot of
partners and potential competitors. It finally emerged as
a real industry. At the end of the 1970s this industry benefited
from the extensive French government programs for investment
in the modernization of the technological infrastructure
of the country. Bull, with its famous two-chip microprocessor,
the CP8, was the first industrial company to invest a lot
of money into the research and development of the technology
of smart cards for microprocessors. Bull registered about
60 patents in this domain. It was in 1980, when France launched
a campaign to support the export of technology, that a marketing
organization of the government created the phrase "smart
card": before this, the cards had simply been called
"memory cards".
Numerous applications
have
allowed the industry to soar to great heights within a period
of less than twenty years. The number of smart cards consumed
at the global level has passed the mark of one billion per
year. The applications range from the ultra low cost telecard
to contact-less access control, proceeding to pay-per-view
TV, cards for portable telephones, bank and customer loyalty
cards, health, identity and transportation fare cards.
Europe
remains
the most important global market, with Germany, Great Britain
and France leading the way. The United States has been using
smart cards in the areas of identification and military
access (control), frequently in combination with biometric
systems, for many years. Nonetheless, the use of smart cards
on a large scale did not occur because the magnetic card
had already been perfectly well established for 40 years.
The new horizons opened in Asia, where the smart card was
introduced into markets that were poorly serviced by competing
systems.
Switzerland
is very
active on all fronts: innovation, development, production,
sales, applications of the cards and of the systems as well
as the machines that produce smart cards for all areas of
application. Swiss enterprises have an especially excellent
position in the area of contact-less smart cards. However,
the limited quantities, the lack of norms and the complexity
of the applications seriously limit the extent to which
the market can really take off, though such a boom is well
deserved from the point of view of ingenuity, know how,
the quality of work, financial engagement and the perseverance
of different key figures in this domain. As an example,
one of the Swiss pioneers in the area of contact-less smart
cards achieved the great feat of finalizing more than fifty
licensing contracts, without, for all that, being sufficiently
profitable even up to now. Another example is that of a
machine manufacturer who managed to place machines with
an annual production capacity of 80 million smart cards
in the United States, no less, and has not, up to now, managed
to cover his investments.
Our trump
needs
to be played. The people, the competence and the technologies
are available, success depends only on how they’re used.
Resources are always limited and in many fields it is essential
to have a critical mass. Flexible strategic cooperation
with different partners in Switzerland and the rest of the
world in development, production, commercialization and
post-sales support are conditions sine qua non for attaining
this. The different outsourcing possibilities must become
a permanent concern. A
number of Swiss and European institutions are ready
to support your projects competently. Concretely: several
members of the APTE Association
are distinguished in the field of smart
cards and contact-less systems.
At the
same time, the acquisition of information about the market,
partners and competitors also needs to have priority. Professional
communication, both internal and external, of the objectives
and course of business is equally a condition of success.
Once these elements are under control, it’s easy to encourage
the enthusiasm of potential partners, even financial partners.
Let’s
take more risks and be more communicative so that we can
finalize commercial plans and finance the success that we
deserve!
Worldwide smart card production – or
the breakthrough of a new industry
with an annual production of more
than 6000 million cards!
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Article
by
Gary Martini, z@apte.net
Copyright
© MTT AG and Gary Martini. Reproduction permitted with
indication of the source
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