Banka Koper issued almost 60,000 smart cards

28.12.2005

Banka Koper announced that it successfully finished the first year of smart card roll-out. As the first bank in Slovenia and one of the first banks in the world, Banka Koper offered its customers smart cards instead of traditional magnetic stripe cards. The pioneering effort has been well accepted as shown by a good uptake of Burja and Meastral packages that were launched in 2005. The former contains a set of services that can be used for e-banking services as well as other services such as e-taxes, e-government and mobile operators service portals. The Maestral package contains a smart card and a portable reader and is currently available to i-Net Banka e-banking service, although it will eventually be rolled out to all other customers as well. Banka Koper is among the first banks in the world to switch to the smart cards that support the mandatory EMV card standard, ensuring its customers the highest level of security at all stages of banking. The most advanced Slovenian bank issued almost 60,000 cards that are based on the EMV standard, developed by MasterCard and Visa.

The migration to the new technology includes issuing new smart cards to customers as well as upgrading of ATMs and POS terminals to accept the new cards. Banka Koper issued almost 34.000 Activa-Maestro smart cards and is the only bank in Europe to equip all Activa-MasterCard cards with the smart card technology. At the same time, the bank also equipped several POS terminals with the smart card identification technology, so the user must enter his PIN when using the terminal, which was not the case in the past. In the beginning of 2006 Banka Koper intends to equip Visa cards with the new technology.

Due to increasing security demands, new regulations and our dedication to providing our customers with the highest level of security, Banka Koper was the first bank in Slovenia to use the new technology, said Gojmir Nabergoj, Business Consultant, Banka Koper. "With our own smart card solution, which has garnered global interest, we covered the entire e-banking field and we are planning to roll out a web-based store and phone banking as well as new services for smart cards."

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