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February 2007 • Volume 12 Number 2
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Member Profile: ACI Worldwide This month, Smart Card Talk spoke with Jeff Beulke, Director Emerging Markets Solution Group, ACI Worldwide. Beulke joined ACI Worldwide in 1997 and is currently responsible for evaluating opportunities and devising strategies to open new markets for existing and new ACI products and technologies. His responsibilities include market opportunity analysis, technology assessment, research and product concept design. Beulke is specially engaged in supporting ACI's smart card initiatives for EMV, NFC Mobile Services, healthcare and emerging channel strategies, working to design ways to bring ACI's product offerings forward to solve business problems for new and existing customers. 1. What is ACI Worldwide's main business profile and offerings? ACI software spans a wide range of technologies and addresses a broad spectrum of electronic payments needs for the world's largest banks, retailers and payment processors, helping drive the transition from "paper to pulse." More than 70 billion times each year, our solutions process consumer payment transactions in traditional and emerging channels. On an average day, ACI software manages more than US$1 trillion in wholesale payments while our infrastructure solutions are helping customers manage mission-critical systems 24/7. ACI's global footprint spans more than 80 countries, allowing us to deliver software and services for the past 30 years. ACI's unique set of end-to-end solutions spans the payment value chain, providing the framework for convergence of functions from authentication, routing, authorization to exception handling, risk management, reconciliation and card/chip issuance. 2. What role does smart card technology play in supporting ACI Worldwide's business? Across the globe, our customers use smart cards in various ways: for nationwide open-payment applications, as a form of identification, and to store information in GSM phones. The groundswell of government activity to secure and verify citizen identity together with the promotion of EMV across the globe to reduce fraud and increase customer convenience via contactless payment offerings are the significant technology drivers for our ACI Smart Chip Manager solution offerings. ACI offers a multifunction smart card lifecycle management solution designed to control every aspect of the lifecycle of a chip and the applications that reside on it. No matter if the chip device is a card, phone, ePassport, mini-fob or some other emerging technology access or acceptance device, our solutions provide the ability to support issuance, suspension/resumption, and modification of the application and its parameters on the chip. As chip acceptance grows in the various channels and markets, smart card technology solutions provided by ACI play a greater role to our business. 3. What trends do you see developing in the market that ACI Worldwide hopes to capitalize on? The convergence trend is clearly driving applications such as payment, loyalty, ticketing, fare collection, and healthcare toward single access points for greater levels of security, utility value, and convenience for the consumer. Physical and logical access convergence is being driven by HSPD-12 bringing these two functions to a single chip platform. Identity theft, card skimming and counterfeiting are the business motivators behind EMV initiatives around the globe. An increasing need for greater levels of privacy, security and access for consumers is responsible for chip deployments for healthcare in countries such as Germany, France and The Netherlands. Consumers have grown used to technology advances allowing them to use a phone, the Internet or other form factor that provides speed, convenience, security and a wide variety of acceptance points to perform their every day normal activities. Smart chip applications deployed on a variety of form factors provide an answer to this growing trend. 4. What obstacles to growth do you see that must be overcome to capitalize on these opportunities? Balancing consumer retention and utility value with cost of deployment is the challenge. Standards, device availability, and business case justification are the usual arguments submitted as examples of obstacles. Yet when governments or card associations mandate or legislate acceptance in markets, these obstacles seem to get resolved more quickly. Once industry realizes that consumers will no longer tolerate theft of identity, having their cards skimmed, or using card-based products that don't provide them with the adequate levels of security and access they need, the loss of consumer confidence in brand and provider will serve as a motivator for change. Investments will come in mobile handset provisioning, merchant terminal acceptance and products in response to the impact of consumer retention and profits. 5. What do you see are the key factors driving smart card technology in the market? Financial losses related to skimming, counterfeiting and identity theft. Regulators and legislators have a keen ear to the consumer who will register their discontent with their votes. Market demographics of the population will also play a key factor in driving this technology. In the U.S., the first of 76 million baby boomers will turn 65, or will reach 65, in the next 10 years. This aging population has grown up with continuous technology advancements and greater levels of information access, security and convenience. Their children will expect and demand even more. 6. How do you see your involvement in the Alliance helping ACI Worldwide become successful? The Alliance has played an important role in driving acceptance of smart card technology across industries and as our customer base continues to expand the traditional payment value chain of financial institutions, merchants and processors, this multi-industry focus is key to our growth strategies. Our software is in use managing over 7 million eID cards in Hong Kong. We are supporting our banking customers in Canada as they begin their migrations to chip. In Europe we have over 30 implementations of our solution supporting the issuance of EMV. ACI has a significant win in the U.S. HSPD-12 space supporting contractors, suppliers and vendor card issuance for FIPS 201. Healthcare continues to be an important focused growth area. Already ACI is exploring the application of contactless technology in areas such as NFC mobile services and public transit. Our participation in the Alliance began with a principal membership with the former Smart Card Forum and continues with the Alliance some 12 years later. We view the Alliance's activities as key to the role of industry education and find our membership invaluable as we support the specific industry council activities, such as our participation in the Healthcare Council. 7. In your role as Secretary for the Alliance Healthcare Council, what do you see are primary goals for the Council for the next year? Providing awareness to the industry on the advancements and benefits of chip technology is a key goal for the Council activities. Smart chip technology has the ability to provided greater levels of access, authentication, cost efficiencies and convenience to various stakeholders is the healthcare segment. The Council focuses on identifying these benefits and increasing the business awareness of the technology's capabilities to the payor, provider and patient communities. A key objective is our focus on cost reduction in the patient care registration process and the benefits of greater level of accessibility and security that will be achieved with smart chip-enabled RHIO and National Healthcare Networks. Bringing our collective global experiences with countries outside the U.S. that have successfully deployed over 80 million chip cards in national roll-outs of healthcare chip cards, serves to bring awareness to the U.S. stakeholders about the practical aspects of large scale deployments.
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