FPC Teams with STMicroelectronics to Develop Biometric Payment Cards

Fingerprint Cards (FPC) and STMicroelectronics have joined forces to develop a new Biometric System-on-Card (BSoC) platform for the financial industry. The technology is specifically geared towards the manufacture of biometric payment cards, and will blend FPC’s T-shape fingerprint sensor with the ST31/STPay chipset and STM32 microcontrollers from STMicroelectronics. The latter two products are part of the STPay secure payments platform.

The result will be a contactless biometric payment card that does not require a battery to generate power. The two companies will initially target the banking industry, but indicated that their cards could have applications that go beyond simple payments. With that in mind, they play to expand to industries like healthcare, access control, and transit in the future.

“This is a powerful collaboration to create innovative solutions that not only make it easier for card makers to integrate biometrics in their portfolio, but also bring the total cost down,” said FPC Payments and Access SVP Michel Roig.

“Cost-effective and user-friendly biometric authentication will significantly increase the security level and user convenience of banking transactions,” added STMicroelectronics Marketing Director Laurent Degauque. “[FPC’s] products combining powerful processing and low energy consumption are ideal companions to our STPay solutions.”

STPay boasts EMVCo and CC EAL 6+ certifications, and runs on Java Card and Global Platform Operating Systems. STMicroelectronics has collaborated with FPC in the past, most notably while developing an end-to-end fingerprint authentication system back in 2016.

For FPC, the new collaboration is in keeping with its recent focus on biometric payment cards. The company has noted that interest in biometric payment technology has gone up during the COVID-19 pandemic, at least in part because biometric authentication will allow payment providers to implement higher contactless payment caps. Both FPC and STMicroelectronics believe that the new BSoC solution will allow payment providers to deliver that kind of contactless utility.  

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July 9, 2020 – by Eric Weiss