Page 90 - Pay Magazine s2014

finance & strategy
Special Section: Cards Still Present
Diane Jackson
with
Payment card solutions provider CPI Card Group is facing the new age of payments head on by continuing to create award-winning payment cards and secure packaging and preparing for the
virtual future with services, such as virtual card provisioning—getting physical card data into your mobile wallet—and more. Paybefore spoke with Diane Jackson, vice president of strategic marketing at CPI, to discuss the global demand for plastic and virtual solutions, and the importance of good design.
CPI Card Group
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Paybefore: What are the big trends driving your business right now? Is it all EMV, all the time?
Diane Jackson: The U.S. EMV migration is the key focus for us. We’ve been supporting our cus- tomers in the migration over the last couple of years. As you would expect, the pace of migration varies amongst financial institutions. The large financial institutions have had their plans in place and have been migrating for the past 18 months, and now we’re seeing the smaller and midsize FI EMV migrations starting to gain momentum. EMV also is starting to penetrate pre- paid in the reloadable verticals, such as government and payroll.
By the end of 2016, a considerable proportion of reloadable prepaid cards will have converted to EMV.
Paybefore: What other trends are you seeing globally?
DJ: We’re seeing momentum in transit, government, payroll and
incentives in the prepaid market. Another area of focus is on virtual prepaid products. CPI currently offers closed-loop virtual gifting; now we are developing open-loop virtual gifting, which is an emerg- ing need in B2B markets.
Mobile payment is a popular topic as well. We see mobile as being complementary to our business; today it does not replace a plastic card. There is, however, a need
to provision a card’s credentials to the mobile wallet, addressing the tech-savvy early adopters.
In 2014 we launched cpiMobile, which delivers secure digital cre- dentials to mobile phones enabling NFC payments. We offer a digital issuance solution that enables our issuer clients to participate in almost any mobile wallet deploy- ment, whether it’s based on secure element or host card emulation. We also offer associated solutions, including wallet manager and a tokenization service.
It’s still relatively early days in terms of the adoption of mobile payments by consumers, but we have to remain relevant to our customers and we are invested
in mobile as a solution. For us,
it’s about the secured data regard- less of the actual form factor. Today, it’s primarily about data
on physical cards, but we can provision the data onto different form factors depending on our customer’s needs.
Paybefore: What’s the appetite for virtual?
DJ: We introduced our virtual closed-loop product in 2012 and now operate that solution in nine international markets. The chal- lenge we sometimes face with virtual is consumer adoption and understanding. Most of our virtual