by Helen Monakhova
Last year saw the fifth anniversary of SmartCity technology which is a platform for creating electronic payment systems based on smart-cards. The technology developed by IT Company (Russia) in collaboration with PTi (USA) is recognized worldwide. This is evidenced by the fact that PTi Company with its annual sales volume reaching $4.5 billion was purchased in October 1998 by ICL Company, a member of Fujitsu concern. bill Mangino, former PTi President and now Vice President of ICL Financial Services, says that after getting access to additional investments, resources, and sales channels, PTi is nurturing rather ambitious plans. It is going to make SmartCity a leading card system all over the world in the near three years. The IT’s status has changed as well. The company “climbed onto the leaders’ shoulders” and now it turned from a co-developer and exclusive supplier of SmartCity in Russia into an engineering partner capable to carry out big projects, including those in East Europe.
In 1998, two new products based on this technology appeared on the market: version 5 of SmartCity system and SmartCity Lite, a lightened version of clearing-settlement system.
SmartCity 5 is a multi-issuer system realized as a client-server architecture (based on Sybase and Oracle data-base management systems). The system is characterized in high speed of data processing and high safety; it supports new-generation boards providing high capacity of key generator. The system is designed to work with an enlarged range of smart cards of known first-rate manufacturer Gem-Plus, including EMV-compatible cards. Also, ICL declared recently about its alliance with Microsoft for support of Windows-cards (in the near future, smart-card reading devices will be installed on PCs). So, it is possible that ICL will be the first company to test these cards.
All in all, about 500,000 smart cards were manufactured and supplied to customers within installed SmartCity systems by 1999 though not all of them have been actually issued. Today, number of large-scale solutions bases on SmartCity has reached 60. These include three military bases and 20 universities in USA, LukOil Company (300 fuel filling stations), and Tcherepovets metallurgy plant. Russia currently covers about half the sales of SmartCity-based solutions (in monetary terms).
As to the IT Company, its card-related business amounts to about 10 percent of total turnover, and its Department of electronic payment systems has 30 employees.
IT: +7-095-947-7979; Web-address: www.it.ru
