American Banknote Brazil Achieves Type Approval for MicroPass-Powered Bank Cards

AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France, October 13th, 2008 – Strengthening its presence in the Brazilian contactless payments market, INSIDE Contactless, the world leader in advanced contactless microprocessor platforms, today announced it has teamed with American Banknote (ABnote) Brazil to produce a MasterCard type-approved contactless payment card for this growing market. INSIDE is supplying ABnote Brazil with its award-winning MicroPass® 4003, a contactless payment processor designed from the ground up for MasterCard® PayPass™ applications, and has worked closely with them to obtain type approval, implement in-house pre-personalization capabilities and ensure their products achieve optimal performance.

American Banknote Brazil is the largest secure printing and transaction service provider in Brazil, producing hundreds of millions of cards each year, and is the unrivalled local leader in bank cards as well as virtually every other product and service category the company offers. American Banknote Brazil’s customers includes Banco Bradesco, Banco Itaú, Unibanco and Banco do Brasil – as well as Caixa Economica Federal, one of the largest government-owned financial institutions in Latin America

“Brazil is South America’s largest economy, and is now undergoing its biggest economic expansion in 30 years, creating a tremendous opportunity for INSIDE to participate in that country’s burgeoning payments market, which recently surpassed the 100 million issued credit card milestone,” said Bertrand Moussel, EVP sales for Latin America at INSIDE Contactless. “Our partnership with American Banknote Brazil opens the door to the contactless payments market in Brazil for us in a very big way, and is the latest example of our successful global expansion strategy.”

The multi-application MicroPass 4003 platform is compliant with latest MasterCard PayPass specifications, enabling ABnote Brazil to more quickly obtain type approval for its products. With built-in support for multiple payment brands, MicroPass 4003-powered cards can be delivered to market quickly and easily.

“INSIDE has the most complete and advanced technology for the contactless payments market, and they provided valuable support to help us adapt our proprietary antenna technology to MicroPass and create contactless payment cards that achieve the maximum performance,” said José Roberto Mauro, vice president of the card division for ABnote Brazil. “INSIDE’s compliance with contactless payment specifications and their technical support helped ensure that we quickly obtained type approval for MasterCard PayPass.”

Since it was first launched at CARTES in November of 2005, the MicroPass intelligent payment platform has achieved its unprecedented success by continuing to deliver superior performance and flexibility, and is now the platform of choice for certified card manufacturers around the world. The MicroPass platform is designed to power open standard contactless and dual-interface bank card payments along with other value-added applications in all global regions. Based upon a RISC architecture and optimized to the demanding requirements of contactless transactions, each of the MicroPass family of products is designed to meet the demands of issuer organizations in the bank card payments, transit and access control markets.