Zwipe biometric payment card partnership in Brazil reaches manufacturing

Zwipe and Brazilian smart card manufacturer Thomas Greg and Sons do Brasil (TGS) have extended their partnership to start manufacturing biometric fingerprint payment cards at small scale and gradually increase production to meet market demands, the company announced.

TGS will integrate the Zwipe Pay ONE platform, which includes Idex Biometrics next-generation biometric system-on-chip fingerprint sensor.

In April 2019, Zwipe and TGS agreed to co-develop and launch biometric payment cards. TGS is one of Latin America’s largest card manufacturers, with 55 million cards produced in 2018.

“We are now seeing increasing interest in biometric payment cards in our region, especially as consumers become much more familiar with contactless payments and demand safer and more hygienic payment alternatives in store,” Hernani Finazzi, CEO of TGS, said in a prepared statement. “We have worked closely to adapt our manufacturing processes to integrate Zwipe’s biometric solution in our card production and we are excited to take this partnership to the next level.”

“Latin America is a fast-emerging region when it comes to payment card usage. We are extremely glad TGS is taking a key step to embrace the Zwipe platform and bring our collaboration to a new level. We look forward to jointly addressing the needs of banks and consumers in Latin America going forward,” André Løvestam, CEO of Zwipe, said in a prepared statement.

Zwipe also recently secured an order for manufacturing fingerprint-enabled payment cards on a small scale with Hong Kong-based Toppan. The race for market share in biometric payment cards was effectively kicked off with the recent announcement that French bank BNP Paribas will issue at least 10,000 units this year.

This post was updated at 3:34pm Eastern on June 30, 2020 to note the biometric platform being used in the cards

Article Topics

biometric cards  |  biometric payments  |  biometrics  |  Brazil  |  contactless biometrics  |  Idex Biometrics  |  Latin America  |  smartcards  |  Zwipe  |  Zwipe Pay