Cartes in North America, Las Vegas – March 5, 2012 – Thales, leader in information systems and communications security, and Aconite, a leading provider of smart application management and EMV transaction processing solutions, announce they have integrated their solutions to support the secure personalisation of smart cards, secure elements on mobile phones and other chip-based tokens, and the processing of smart transactions. Card and mobile application issuers and transaction processors can now deploy smart card and mobile application personalisation simply, efficiently and securely. Resulting from this extended partnership, Thales and Aconite will jointly present their vision for the secure issuance of NFC applications on mobile phones at Cartes in North America 2012.

Aconite delivers smart product management solutions for payments (including EMV, Chip & PIN and contactless), mobile, loyalty, transit and e-ID. Aconite solutions issue and manage chips on any device and also process its transactions, supporting instant issuance and prepaid payment applications as well as smart applications. As these chip solutions rely totally on secure cryptographic processes, Aconite solutions integrate with Thales payShield 9000 hardware security modules (HSMs) to provide chip personalisation, transaction processing and the complex key management processes that underlie these essential operations. Together Thales and Aconite provide a world leading smart product capability in a highly secure environment.

Aconite is a member of the Thales Alliance for Solution and Application Providers (ASAP) program. Thales partners with leading technology companies and systems integrators to meet the data security needs of security-conscious organizations around the globe. The ASAP program develops technical partnerships to ensure that Thales solutions integrate seamlessly with leading applications and hardware, making it easy to deploy best practice security solutions.

“Aconite supplies Thales payShield 9000 HSMs to users of our Affina® Enterprise smart product life-cycle management system,” says Patrick Regester, EVP Sales and Marketing at Aconite. “The undoubted security, high performance, scalability, reliability and powerful key management of the Thales HSM is an important element of our overall solution. This integration eliminates any concerns over compatibility or the ability to support all the functions needed for the management of smart applications. Thales payShield 9000 HSMs also provide the core security capability that is a fundamental part of our Mobile Application Manager™ solution for over-the-air (OTA) provisioning of mobile applications to NFC phones. As a member of the Thales ASAP program, we look forward to working closely with Thales to deliver fully integrated card and mobile lifecycle management solutions to our customers.”

“As providers move to put applications that carry real value on to phones, users expect  the transactions they initiate as well as the issuance, personalisation and management of the applications to be as secure as the travel cards, payments cards and so on that they carry today” says Franck Greverie, Thales vice president in charge of information technology security activities.” Aconite’s use of Thales’s banking grade security allows customers to respond rapidly to the fast evolving market with leading secure and efficient applications.”

Visit us at Cartes in North America 2012, Hotel Mirage, Las Vegas, March 5-7, 2012 booth #500

Global Mobile Payment and Services Initiatives: Dedicated Security for Mobile Issuance
Jose Diaz, Thales and Mike Vaselenak, Aconite
10.30am Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Visit www.paymentssecurity.com for industry issues and comment.