Manama- Kingdom of Bahrain, Monday, June 05, 2006

Aims to boost the EMV Card Personalization in Qatar- Doha.

AFS, the region’s first and most prominent provider of electronic–payments and consumer finance outsourcing services have an established presence in the card payment arena, ensuring reliability, ease of migration and a sound strategy for long-term investment in technology. As a ready-made and pre-configured package, EMV Card Personalization services from AFS has been designed to be quick and simple for customers to implement – lowering the barriers to entry for banks into the rapidly growing smart card payment arena.

A diverse audience of business leaders, senior members of banking, financial, and business communities, financial and researchers, and the press of Qatar, will gather at the 1st EMV seminar hosted by AFS at the Four Seasons Hotel, Doha, Qatar on Tuesday, June 13, 2006 to participate in "The EMV Card Personalization's seminar".

The seminar is expected to generate discussions and ideas on how to develop the solutions that help banks to reduce growing risks in counterfeit fraud, generate new revenue and avoid the industry’s penalties for not migrating. AFS shows the way to a quicker, smoother and cost efficient migration to EMV Compliance.

Through the seminar, AFS representatives will provide an overview about AFS mission, strategy and present how the smart chip became a crucial step in the worldwide battle against spiraling fraud losses that are putting a serious strain on bankcards' profitability. With EMV in place compliance, banks can expect both revenue and profit growth from their card portfolios.

The term « fraud » covers different realities whether for an issuing bank, an acquiring bank or a merchant. Objectives must be first defined in terms of financial, image and clients’ protection. It is then possible to select solutions and services and therefore measure the effects depending on the predefined objectives,” said: Rasool Hujair, CEO AFS.

And he added:"In just a few short years, AFS' card personalization technology has expanded from relatively simple systems for door access to much more complex personalization systems for banks' markets. At the same time, card encoding is evolving from the relatively simple bar code and magnetic stripe cards to complex schemes with smart cards, proximity cards, and hybrid cards, which use multiple technologies on a single card."