La Caixa Selects Gemalto’s Optelio

• Gemalto announces it has been selected by La Caixa to roll out its Optelio EMV contactless cards in Barcelona by end 2012. The specialist is in charge of producing and customising one million cards.

• With over 10 million customers, the Spanish leader prevails on the contactless market and has been working for several months on migrating its card fleet to this technology, with expected closure by end 2015.

• Meanwhile, La Caixa is perusing mass deployments with over 15,000 compatible POS devices installed at merchants and 500 ATMs embedding dedicated sensors.

Source: Press release by Gemalto

• Over the past few months, Spain has being displaying its eagerness to fuel a contactless ecosystem and several large scale banking players (especially La Caixa, BBVA and Bankia) have committed to mass deployments of contactless cards.

• La Caixa has been leading the way in these deployments; it now carries on installing contactless POS devices and ATMs estates (also willing to meet the needs of its disabled customers) to be embedding Fujitsu’s technology (see April 2011 and January 2012 Insights).

• Cards are easier to roll out and also more easily adopted by consumers, which is why they are primarily concerned. Mobile media are not being discarded however and various contactless multiservice-based initiatives have been started (Orange, Telefónica Movistar and Vodafone joined forces in March 2011, for instance)

• Barcelona was elected Mobile World Capital by the GSMA in July 2011, and gives voice to a national interest in contactless technologies and related pilot experiments.