Customer Profile : The bank was established in June 2001 and has risen to be one of the largest banks in Poland providing financial services to both corporate and personal customers. The bank offers its services via a network of over 500 branches as well as via the use of over 1000 of its own ATMs.
Through its subsidiaries, the bank also provides its customers insurance, leasing, factoring and brokerage services, and a variety of financial fund services. With the looming onset of the EMV / chip card standard, our customer decided to replace their magnetic stripe bank cards with EMV / chip cards.
This leading bank already operated its own production centre for the personalisation of magnetic stripe bank cards and was now faced with a large capital investment in order to accommodate chip card production. Our customer began to invest heavily in its personnel to better understand the technicalities of the EMV migration process.
The bank felt that to replace the magnetic stripe cards with chip cards was a far more complicated exercise than merely upgrading some machines.
The Challenge : We wanted to implement an EMV system of hardware and software that could embrace their anticipated customer-base growth and accommodate any future chip card specification changes.
They were also under immense pressure to implement the solution quickly and efficiently while delivering a cost-effective solution that offered them the quality and reliability they required So, the search for the complete EMV solution was on.
The NBS Solution: NBS Technologies proposed the installation of its scalable and cross platform EMV software solution, Xpressi™. Xpressi is NBS’ flagship EMV software suite that provides a modular approach to central card issuance environments delivering the core capabilities required to issue smart cards.
The core architecture provides the ability to support any smart card platform and application and most brands of personalization equipment enabling issuers to leverage existing equipment of various brands and expand capacity with relative ease.
The installation is a full NBS system comprising of Horizon™ Evolution high-volume smart card personalization machine, SmartSys™ machine control software, and Xpressi™ EMV software. "We chose Xpressi primarily because of its scalability and ease-of-use.
We had a very tight timeline to implement EMV and the user-friendliness and ease of implementation of NBS Software enabled us to achieve it - the exceptionally high level of technical assistance from the NBS Software Technical Group contributed greatly to this project's success." said Kazmierski Krzysztof, Manager of Card Systems at BZWBK. NBS Software is extremely flexible and gives us the opportunity to produce cards with a single machine/software - it truly is a complete system. And together with the SafeNet HSM’s, it was clearly the most cost effective." The EMV software installation project at BZWBK began 2005 where NBS software was installed within a few weeks and the first cards were personalised for Visa® and MasterCard® certification.
BZWBK is currently using more than 4 different card manufacturers' equipment, to personalize more than 79 different card types for different customers. BZWBK considers this EMV migration investment a valuable one as their production centre now has the ability to personalize EMV contactless cards and is considered one of the most efficient in the personalization of bankcards in Poland. BZWBK looks forward to now expanding its chip bank card customer base.
“We are very proud to be part of such a successful project. They (BZWBK) made the right decision to select NBS and their software and are now assured to have a system that can be used now and in the future to accommodate new card technologies. The NBS Xpressi solution is built for the future, and this implementation proves that the system is indeed the most flexible in the market. The NBS EMV hardware and software installation will be serviced and maintained by NBS’ local partner, CardService.
