French IT services provider to expand Phl, Asia operations

MANILA, Philippines - French security and identification solutions and services provider Oberthur Technologies is looking at investing more money to expand its operations in Asia including the Philippines.

“We are thinking of increasing our capacity in Asia. We have a few possibilities where to increase capacity and the Philippines is one of the places we are considering, but the decision has not been made yet,” Oberthur Technologies president and chief executive officer Didier Lamouche told reporters.

He said the Philippine expansion will depend on the growth of the company’s business  in the country.

Oberthur Technologies provides electronic passports in the country. It also supplies the SIM cards to telecommunications firm Smart Communications Inc. and bank cards to BDO Unibank, Inc. and HSBC.

The firm has a small manufacturing plant or service center in the country, where the loading of critical information of customers on credit cards takes place.

It likewise has two research and development centers located in Makati City, with one dedicated to developing solutions and software for mobile payments, and the other for identity products such as electronic passports and cards.

Lamouche said the company’s revenues from all segments of its business in the Philippines have been growing and are seen to rise further by 10 to 20 percent this year.

In the coming years, he said the firm is upbeat growth will be seen particularly in the payments segment as banks in the country migrate its cards to Europay Mastercard Visa (EMV) – chip enabled cards.

The EMV chip cards provide better protection from fraud compared to the magnetic stripe cards currently used locally.

Last year, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas ordered banks to replace automated teller machine cards with new EMV-enabled ones between 2015 and 2017 to prevent hacking incidents.

“The migration to EMV is a big hope for us. We hope it is going to come fast,” Lamouche said.

“All the hackers are targeting countries that have not migrated and you don’t want to be the last one. It is important to protect the people,” he said.