USA, nation of honor

USA market information Data provided by Smart Card Alliance

Government

Program: U.S. Electronic Passport

• Issuer: U.S. Department of State and Government Printing Office
• Scope: All U.S. passports; 24 million issued to date
• Technology: contactless (RF-enabled microprocessor smart card)
• Summary: For the last year all new U.S. passports include contactless technology consistent with ICAO standards. The State Department's decision to use contactless smart card technology better protects travelers, streamlines immigration processes and improves the security of the passport booklet.
  There are several security features. First, there's a digital signature, a type of electronic seal that proves that the passport was issued by a legitimate passport authority. A reader can verify this seal is authentic, reducing dependency on a border agent to determine a fraudulent passport. Second, the information on the front page of the passport is stored electronically in the chip. It is all locked together and signed (sealed) so that any change to it would break the seal and be detected. Third, by comparing the passport, the digital information including the photograph of the passport owner, and the bearer at passport control, border agents can make sure that the person presenting the passport is the person to whom the passport was issued.
  Privacy is assured in the U.S. ePassport with Basic Access Control. The ePassport cannot be read unless the cover is open. A unique printed key inside the passport must be scanned and presented to the ePassport before it will transmit its contents. The key is used to encrypt the communications.

Program: Personal Identity Verification (PIV) card

• Issuer:  U.S. Federal Government
• Scope:  All federal employees and subcontractors; issuing in progress; eventually will include about 1.8 million individuals plus DOD personnel (see below)
• Technology: dual contact/contactless, often paired with proximity physical access control
• Summary: Per U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) directives stemming from Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12), by 2009 all federal employees and contractors will have had their identity checked and cleared, and will have a smart card-based identity credential called the Personal Identity Verification (PIV) card. The PIV is a common, governmentwide smart card credential for both physical access control and information security that is being issued to all federal government employees and subcontractors.
  The cards must be compliant with FIPS 201 standards. One goal of compliance with HSPD-12 and FIPS is to fully use the smart card-based PIV card within a physical access control system to have a machine-readable way to validate credentials, instead of relying on visual inspection. Another goal is to have a common credential usable across all departments. In addition, the card can be used to secure computer logons, network access, email encryption and digital signature.
  The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) will be personalizing and issuing the federal government's PIV smart card-enabled identity cards for more than 65 federal agencies and departments.  GSA won the 2008 Outstanding Smart Card Achievement Award for an Issuing Organization from the Alliance.

Program: DoD Common Access Card (CAC)

• Issuer: U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC)
• Scope: All DoD personnel, more than 12 million smart cards issued to date
• Technology: contact smart card
• Summary: The Common Access Card is a smart card that serves as the standard military identification and physical access credential. It is also used for network access, digital signature and document encryption. The card is issued to active duty military in the U.S. Army and Air Force, selected reservists and National Guard, DoD civilian employees and DoD contractors.

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Payments

Program: Open network contactless payment (MasterCard PayPass, Visa PayWave, American Express ExpressPay, Discover branded)

• Issuers: Banks, credit card companies including Advanta, Bank of America, BB&T, Charter One, Citibank, Citizens Bank, Compass Bank, GE Consumer Finance, HSBC Bank, JP Morgan Chase ‘Blink' card, Keybank, Meijer Stores, Metabank, Peoples Bank of Paris (Texas), SunTrust, US Bank, WaMu, Wells Fargo
• Scope: 35 million in 2007, nearly doubling from 19 million in 2006 (Open programs only excluding transit; Source: JupiterResearch)
• Technology: contactless RF-enabled microprocessor smart card
• Summary: MasterCard announced issuance of contactless PayPass devices doubled from a year earlier to 28 million as of last quarter, and so did the number of PayPass accepting merchants, to 109,000 worldwide. And Visa announced its contactless cards are the most rapidly adopted new payment technology in Visa's history.
  A long list-too long to include here-of American blue chip retailers are accepting contactless payments. Here are just a few examples: 7-Eleven, ACE Hardware, AMC Theaters, Arby's, CVS/pharmacy, Pepsi, Regal (Theaters) Entertainment Group, Coca Cola (vending),Taco Bell, Wakefern Food Corporation (ShopRite supermarkets), Walgreens, and most sports stadiums and coliseums.
  Industry insiders estimate there are more than 400,000 contactless readers in place at 80,000 merchant locations, mostly in the United States (Source: VivoTech). 
  Usage is on the rise too, especially with younger consumers, according to new consumer research from JupiterResearch. Of all respondents in the 25 to 34 year old age group, already 9.4 percent use contactless payment once a week or more.

Program: Transit fare payment systems

• Issuers:  Transit operators in every major U.S. city: Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; San Francisco; Oakland; Los Angeles; Chicago; San Diego; Seattle; Minneapolis; Houston; Boston; Philadelphia; Atlanta; and the New York-New Jersey area.
• Technology: Contactless smart cards
• Summary: State-of-the-art contactless smart card-based fare collection systems are either operational or currently being delivered in all of these cities transit systems.  Two of the largest to date-Washington DC's SmarTrip card and the Boston MBTA CharlieCard-have issued over 2.5 million and over 1.4 million fare cards respectively.  Ultimately, the industry estimates more than 15 million contactless smart cards and 20,000 payment processing devices will be deployed.

Program: Wireless telecommunications services

• Issuers:  AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Rogers (Canada)
• Scope:  450 million subscriptions at the end of Q1 2008 in the Americas (Source: 3g Americas news release)
• Technology: SIM and UICC
• Summary: In the United States as the rest of the world, the largest issuers of smart card technology are mobile network operators in the form of SIMs/UICCs.  GSM is the number one mobile technology in the America's, with a 64% regional share of market, according to industry group 3G America's. The industry will benefit greatly from the migration to the newer 3G/LTE broadband technologies. One of the significant events of the year was Verizon's announcement to move to LTE for broadband. As the last main holdout for CDMA, their decision means all of the major carriers in the United States will now have smart card technology in their broadband enabled handsets.

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Entreprise and Industry

Program: Healthcare patient cards

• Issuer: Mount Sinai Medical Center, Inland Northwest Health Services (INHS)/LifeNexus and others
• Scope: Early stages of adoption
• Technology: contact smart cards
• Summary: Like many U.S. sectors, the healthcare industry is driven primarily by the private sector and consists of many stakeholders with different business interests including healthcare service providers, insurance companies, employers and patients to name a few. Smart cards are starting to gain momentum as a personal, secure way to control patient personal, insurance and medical information. This provides important advantages to healthcare providers, such as making sure the correct billing and medical information is associated with the correct individual. 
  One project at Mount Sinai Medical Center involves issuing smart card-based Personal Health Cards (PHC) to patients. The goal is to make sure patients are accurately linked with their personal medical information. Language barriers, common names or even common addresses can lead to errors and result in commingled or duplicate patient records. Correcting those records is a big expense for hospitals; Mount Sinai has had two major database cleanup projects in the last three years, costing more than two million dollars each.
  Another regional healthcare network in Spokane, Wash. is starting to use smart card technology. LifeNexus is starting to deploy its smart card-based Personal Health Card with Inland Northwest Health Services (INHS), a member of the Northwest Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO) connecting 38 hospitals in northwest Washington and Idaho. The goal of a RHIO is to facilitate the sharing of electronic medical records between physicians, labs and hospitals across large geographic areas. The LifeNexus Personal Health Card will act as a personal key people use to unlock access to their medical information. 
  There are two important advantages to using smart card technology for storing personal health and insurance information-security and portability. The smart cards will typically store personal, insurance and medical information that people normally provide when they fill out forms at a doctor's office or hospital. It will also store any allergies, medicine restrictions, health conditions, and information about recent medical results and lab tests. 

Program: Information security and digital signature

• Issuer: Many blue chip U.S. corporations including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Caterpillar, Microsoft, Boeing, Sun Microsystems and many others
• Scope: Growth stage of adoption
• Technology: contact smart cards and USB tokens, often with proximity access control in a single credential
• Summary: The number of U.S. employees using smart card technology to access computers and networks at work continues to grow as enterprises and different industry sectors look for better ways to protect information and facilitate electronic and Web-based commerce. Aggregated numbers are not available, but Pfizer has issued approximately 60,000 smart card credentials, Microsoft about 50,000 and Boeing 160,000, to cite a few examples.
  Leading IT infrastructure companies have worked with smart card technology providers to deliver off-the-shelf or even on-demand solutions for card management, as well as compatible out-of-the-box applications like identity management, single sign-on, hot desktops and digital signature. The result is that smart cards for IT security are now within reach of any sized organization. 
  Specific sectors are also organizing e-commerce and digital signature frameworks. For example, the pharmaceutical industry is moving rapidly to use digital identification and signatures, and the companies involved are mostly using smart cards or USB tokens, according to the SAFE-BioPharma Association. The most popular application is electronic lab notebooks. Researchers are required to have a witness sign and date records for every experiment they do; replacing these wet signatures is a big time saver. The organization's membership is a who's who of the industry, including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Proctor & Gamble and many other household names. SAFE-BioPharma acts as a trust broker, bridging trust networks between the organization's members and providing an implementation framework that gives digital signatures the same legal stature as wet ones. The industry vision is to be totally electronic by 2012.
  The aerospace and defense industry has a similar global initiative called the Transglobal Secure Collaboration Program (TSCP).  It aims to provide a trust network for federated identities and secure information exchange between governments and defense contractors worldwide. This will ultimately impact some 300,000 companies in the global supply chain.

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US exhibitors at CARTES & IDentification 2008

USA also highlighted at the Congress

C2- USA MARKET FOCUS

Tuesday November 4, 2008 - 14:30-16:30

Chairman: Randy VANDERHOOF - SmartCard Alliance

The United States, slow to smart card adoption compared to other global markets, has been re-energized in recent years with contactless payments innovation, secure identification at its borders and for access to government protected facilities, and a maturing mobile telecom industry that has accelerated the demand for smart card-enabled electronic transactions.  This conference will highlight the new technologies and market changes that have made the U.S.A. one of the fastest growing markets for smart cards in the world.

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