Card Management System
The potential of multi-application smart cards enables banks, governments and enterprises to exploit new business opportunities, to reduce fraud, restructure their cost base, streamline administration or to meet legislative or card scheme mandates. Intelligent application of mandates can also create revenue or cost saving opportunities, creating a benefit from a necessity. With industry specific obligations such as EMV, HSPD-12 and biometric border controls creating additional momentum, smart card deployments on a significant scale are becoming increasingly common. However, issuers and service providers planning to migrate to smart cards, or who plan to add new card types and applications to their card base, must also accept the new challenges created by this technology.
To begin with, the relationships between cards, data, cardholders and applications demand more dynamic, flexible and efficient management.
The Card Application Management system often needs to receive or send data, commands or notifications relating to different event or state changes when they occur, meaning that the CMS will potentially need to communicate with a diverse range of systems, not all of which are necessarily under the control of the issuing organization. This requires the CMS module to be:
Process Driven
The lifecycles of the card, cardholder and application(s) define the events and subsequent changes in state that need to be executed. Some may be initiated manually, some may be interactive, and others may be scheduled or automated processes, but it is essential to ensure that these processes are managed securely, efficiently and reliably. As there will always be new client specific business processes, the system is adaptable enough to easily allow changes in the workflow or processes without impacting the rest of the system.
Flexible Interfacing
Clearly the CMS may need to communicate with a number of systems, and these systems are likely to have different technologies and behaviors. For example, importing an embossing file is typically a batch oriented task sourced from a legacy system, whereas card requests from a distributed branch environment would typically require an on-line web service or web enabled interface, and Post-issuance application updates take place via interactive web sessions. For this CMS supports flexible, cross-technology interfaces to accommodate the various ‘push’, ‘pull’ and interactive needs.
Adaptable
Business and technology demands can change quickly, and the CMS is flexible enough to adapt to new requirements, whether these are simply additional fields in cardholder records, or whether it is to support new card types, applications, enrolment and issuing models et cetera. The option to download or update applications onto the existing card population also provides added business agility, which can lead to cost savings by avoiding the need to reissue cards, or potentially provide profitable business opportunities.
Legacy-aware, Open and Platform Independent
CMS is often required to support a combination of ‘legacy’ or proprietary technologies, and more current open standards technologies. To maintain flexibility and prevent vendor ‘lock-in’, the CMS itself is based on open technologies, cross-industry standards and supports appropriate industry specific standards where applicable.