OREANDA-NEWS. July 23, 2015. Proxama PLC (AIM: PROX), the international mobile commerce Company specialising in proximity marketing and a provider of end-to-end payment solutions for card issuers and processors, is pleased to announce a new contract with a major European Payment Processor customer to provide enhanced secure electronic distribution of card PIN numbers. The contract is expected to generate in excess of 100,000 in the current financial year with the potential to generate further income in future years.

Proxama has been contracted by this customer to implement 'Virtual PIN Pad' (VPP) a significant enhancement to their existing Proxama PIN (personal identification number) Manager solution. The customer currently manages the issuance of credit and debit cards as well as processing card payment transactions on behalf of its banking clients and through them today covers some 10 million existing card holders. The VPP enhancement allows cardholders to securely view and change their PIN through a web browser on a computer or mobile phone.  The solution meets industry standards for secure protection of cardholder PINs and has been designed to be easily implemented into card issuer systems.

Sending out PIN details by post for new payment cards or where cardholders have forgotten PINs represents a significant cost as well as a security weakness, as PIN mailers can go missing. At the same time, waiting for a PIN mailer is inconvenient for cardholders as it delays use of their card and for the same reason, is costly for the issuing bank.

Implementing VPP will bring substantial benefits to the client's bank customers by reducing costs and improving security, at the same time as benefiting bank cardholder customers who can now quickly view and obtain or change their PIN online.

Proxama is engaged with a number of additional prospective clients for its PIN Manager solution, with a particular interest being seen in the USA.  The migration from magnetic stripe to chip (EMV) cards in the USA is causing all payment cards to be re-issued and banks are looking at new options for cardholder security including moving from signature to PINs to authorise payment. Proxama's PIN Manager with the Virtual PIN Pad provides the ideal solution for this market.

Mike Woods, CEO of Proxama's Digital Payments Division comments: "This new contract award builds on our long term partnerships with clients and continues to demonstrate our ability to bring innovative solutions to the payment industry with substantial benefits for payment processors, issuing banks and their cardholders. Approximately 45% of payment cards in circulation today use chip technology. This equates to some 1.5 billion cards in circulation. Increasingly these cards use PINs, instead of the less secure signature, to authorise and protect transactions. We at Proxama are seeing this rapidly expanding adoption of PINs as a major area of growth for our company going forward."