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June 2007 • Volume 12 Number 6
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Executive Director's Letter
One of the great privileges of my job is when I am called upon to serve as a traveling ambassador for the North American smart card industry. In doing so, I get the opportunity to pontificate to all of my foreign listeners about the successes we are experiencing in the growth of smart card usage in government ID, contactless payments, transportation, enterprise security, mobile telecom, and healthcare. I carry the collective achievements of my constituents proudly like badges of honor that I can take little credit for achieving but will proudly show off to anyone who will listen. My most recent opportunity to wear the VIP honors of my country came when I represented the Smart Card Alliance at the World IC Summit in Beijing, China earlier this month. The event organizer, Frank Xu, executive director of the Smart Card Forum of China, is someone I have befriended through our mutual participation within ISCAN, the international network of smart card organizations, to which we both belong. Frank began planning this international summit two years ago and wanted to target this year, the year before the Beijing Summer Olympic Games in 2008, as the year to assemble the world's smart card organizations together at one event. The goal was to show the Chinese smart card industry that we all are part of the same global market and that the opportunities and obstacles to overcome are no different for China than they are in the rest of the world. I was joined by my ISCAN colleagues from Canada, Europe, and Asia Pacific and representatives from GlobalPlatform, EMVCo, and NIST who provided the standards viewpoint for international smart card adoption. As always, I felt I learned much more than I gave back in my presentations. I had the opportunity to talk about our global leadership position in contactless payments and government IDs , specifically ePassports. The fact that China has already issued about 20 million national IDs, and the 2007 forecast is to issue 200 million more, means that the U.S. is never going to win the numbers race. However, our deployment of microprocessor cards other than SIM cards is going to be leading the market for some time to come. Beyond measuring business achievements, the Chinese people are warm and very gracious. They pay close attention to protocol and mutual respect at all times. I always felt humble by the attention and courtesy they showed me as a foreign visitor. I feel insensitive and aloof that I have never shown such respect in return when I have played host to international visitors here -- yet another thing I learned from my roving ambassador role. Next week, I am off to London and Dublin, Ireland, to combine some more international smart card diplomacy with much-needed personal time to sample some Back home, where the real work and heavy lifting are being carried out on a daily basis, I wanted to express my gratitude to the dedicated members of the Physical Access Council. PAC members have been working diligently in a consensus-building effort along with the SIA and OSE organizations to define a unified government migration strategy for PACS integration with FIPS 201. A small but determined work group is providing comments and re-writing a major section of a draft physical security migration report that is being proposed to government Interagency Security Committee reporting into the Executive Steering Committee. The Council's contribution is providing guidance on the options for migrating to new PIV credentials for PACS integration that can help agencies plan their investment to migrate to full FIPS 201 compliance. The Contactless Payments Council has put together another topical web seminar for next month, entitled Contactless Payments: The Retailer Experience. The web seminar will be held on July 19th and will feature first-hand experience from contactless merchants Arby’s, Jack in the Box, and Dr. Pepper/ 7 UP Inc., and an analyst report from Aberdeen Group. The Identity Council has its eyes focused on a government briefing on Capitol Hill on July 17th on securing identity. The Transportation Council and the Healthcare Council are developing new white papers to be released later this year. All in all, another great month ahead from our working volunteers in the Smart Card Alliance. On a closing note, mark your calendar for October 9-11, 2007 for the Smart Card Alliance 2007 Annual Conference happening in the great city of Boston, MA. If you attended last year’s conference in San Diego, or the year before in Miami, you know that this is the one event each year you have to attend. You will be hearing and reading about this a great deal over the summer but make your hotel reservations early and, non-members, take advantage of the early registration discounts available. See you all in Boston! Randy Vanderhoof
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