The News

Inside's Micropass reaches new milestone with 20 million units sold

06/06/2007

Increasing Adoption by Leading Issuers Establishes MicroPass® as the Dominant Platform for Contactless Bank Cards in the US

Aix en Provence, France, June 6th 2007 – INSIDE Contactless, the leading provider of advanced, open standard contactless chip technologies, today announced that sales of its revolutionary MicroPass® contactless platform have exceeded 20 million units, since it was announced in November of 2005. The majority of MicroPass shipments have been in the US market but have also included units for deployment in Asia, Latin America and Canada, establishing MicroPass as the single dominant platform, with the greatest market share for open standard contactless payments.

MicroPass is the leading platform used by multiple card manufacturers as the basis for card product approvals with Visa and MasterCard and has been the basis for the first Discover Network approval. MicroPass has been adopted by more than a dozen leading issuers in the United States, used as the basis for credit, debit and pre-paid rollouts.

MicroPass is valued by card manufacturers and issuers because of its multi-brand support for Visa, MasterCard, and Discover. It provides card manufacturers with superior flexibility in terms of packaging & delivery model, and provides support for value-added functions including MicroLoyalty applications. Issuers prefer MicroPass enabled cards because they deliver the best possible card holder experience, in terms of transaction processing speeds and read distance, which provides a successful card holder experience the first time, every time. With the advantages of MicroPass plus the flexibility and support provided by the INSIDE support team, MicroPass has been a natural choice of card manufacturers and issuers.

“MicroPass continues to gain favor as the contactless platform of choice because of its performance and overall value, said Charles Walton, EVP of Payments for INSIDE Contactless. “Our ongoing technical innovation, best-in-class support, and flexibility enable us to effectively meet the needs of issuers and card manufacturers. MicroPass is the most cost-effective contactless platform in the industry, and we’re committed to keeping it that way – so that we can continue to deliver value to our customers and partners.”

 

About INSIDE Contactless:

As the only fabless semiconductor company focused exclusively upon contactless chip platforms, INSIDE Contactless is a market leader in Near Field Communication (NFC), contactless payments, and access control. Innovation in contactless technology has led to essential NFC technology patents granted to INSIDE along with more than 55 other patents. INSIDE is the #1 market share company in contactless payment market in the US with more than 20 million chip platforms delivered to bank card issuers through card manufacturer partners and more than 12 leading bank card issuers. More than 25 key partners around the global, including HID, Giesecke & Devrient, and SAGEM, have successfully delivered contactless products such as payment & access cards, point of sale terminals, NFC enabled mobile handsets, and other products which are ‘powered by INSIDE’. INSIDE Contactless is headquartered in Aix-en-Provence, France, with offices in Shanghai, Singapore, Poland, San Francisco, and Boston. For more information, please visit http://www.insidecontactless.com/.

About MicroPass™
MicroPass is a family of intelligent hardware platforms designed to power open standard contactless and dual interface bank card payments 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 feature low power consumption, fast transaction processing, and overall performance meeting the demands of issuer organizations in the bank card payments, transit, and access control markets. MicroPass is the platform of choice for card manufacturers and issuers in the US market with more than 20 million bank cards deployed which are MicroPass powered. INSIDE’s MicroPass L4-2G is an enhanced, next-generation microprocessor-based contactless chip platform designed specifically to meet multi-payment brand and multi-application requirements within the US contactless payment market. With very low power requirements, MicroPass also remains the most suitable core platform for key fob and alternative form factor deployments.