Highlights from Cardist 2010

3rd Cardist Card & Smart Technologies Exhibition & Summit is held in Istanbul between 12–14 May 2010 with the main sponsorships of BKM, Visa and MasterCard.

Here are my highlights from the exhibition:

Garanti & Avea announced a mobile payment product based on mobile phones. Payment is processed by the application running on SIM card and the SIM card has an external antenna attached. This way, there’s no need for an NFC based handset, all handsets can be used with. it. Garanti Bank already has more than 1 million contactless credit cards issued and clearly the market leader in contactless payments in Turkey.

BKM, the national switch of Turkey announced the pilot project to run on NFC handsets in which BKM acts as the TSM. 6 banks are attending the pilot project.

Oytek demonstrated their NFC solutions running on Nokia 6212. The application has a paid balance, ticketing and couponing extensions. There’s also a kiosque with a contactless reader and an NFC poster application to complete the NFC picture.

Banksoft was awarded with the contactless pre-paid card program which was developed for Halk Bank’s Bank 24 Visa contactless card. Smartsoft is also awarded with their pre-paid platform as well.

Payment Cards&Mobile, which I think the best magazine on contactless systems was also present in the exhibition as they were in the last two ones.

Belbim, the technology provider of Istanbul Municipality -including the electronic ticketing for public transport- exhibited their validators and surrounding devices. Belbim has developed a DesFire application for Istanbul public transport but somehow it’s still not been released for public use.

KentKart was also present and demonstrated contactless only validators and vehicle tracking systems.