news

Director buying:
maybe things are looking better.
"Brazilian Bank Plans High-Tech Debit Card


Banrisul, a state-owned bank in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, plans next year to begin rolling out a chip-based debit card carrying a digital certificate for online banking identity verification, according to Mauricio Coelho, director of public key infrastructure at Brazil’s Information Technology Institute. The bank expects to issue some 2 million debit cards with the digital certificate over the next few years, says Coelho, who spoke this week at a conference in the United States organized by the U.S. trade group Smart Card Alliance. He says it will be the first such bank-owned smart card in Brazil with payment and online-security features. The card will use the Multos smart card operating system from U.S.-based StepNexus. Coelho explained in a presentation to the conference that Brazil has over the last five years developed one of the world’s largest network-authentication systems based on the security technology known as PKI. He says 500,000 digital certificates have been issued, of which 100,000 are stored on smart cards or USB tokens that plug into computers. The rest are stored on computer hard drives. He says the most common way certificates are used is to authenticate Brazilians to Web-based government services. (2006-10-04)"
StepNexus linked with Keycorp.