By Joe Naujokas, Naujokas & Associates

The scope of the card durability work program received a lot of attention at the Barcelona WG1 meeting last March. Initially, when WG1 first started working on card durability 2001, the focus was primarily on the card body, leaving the machine readable technology to follow. However, due to the protracted time to get the project moving and to accumulate data, the industry is now in need of IC technology durability. Some WG1 experts want to begin moving forward on all aspects of card durability as more applications are using IC technology.

Support for going beyond the card body durability also comes from the fact that card body durability is heavily impacted by what is added to the card body. For instance, a blank card body could have flex life from 10,000 flexes to 100,000 depending on materials used. When printing is added, the flex life will decrease. The flex life reduction continues with the addition of embossing, a mag stripe and an embedded IC module and laminated IC/Antenna modules. Therefore, concentrating on card durability of the card body itself will not solve problems in the field.

The big driver in IC cards is the SIM card comprising over 80% of the IC card market. The SIM is tucked away into its cocoon inside the cell phone, so durability is not a big issue. The same is true of the satellite TV cards. Telephone cards are short-lived throw away cards. All these applications probably comprise at least 90% of today’s IC card market.

This is beginning to change as the EMV, government ID and transit applications for IC cards begin to expand. Now, card durability issues are becoming important as IC cards are being carried long-term in wallets, pockets and purses. These applications are finding a serious void in the International Standards community for card durability test methods and criteria.

To be sure, there are National Body efforts. ANSI has been working on card durability for 12 years and has developed and published test methods (including one revision) and now has data (The Xavier University 4 year Student ID card) to verify the validity of some test methods. A draft of criteria standards has been prepared and should be ready for public review in 2005. I expect the criteria document will be published in 2006.

The Association Française de Normalisation (AFNOR) has recently disclosed the results of their seven-year development work on financial IC cards that has reduced the return rate from 11% to 2%. However, no information has been released yet on the test methods and criteria used to drive down the return rate. AFNOR did note that the sequence testing proposal was inadequate for this application and needs beefing up.

At the international level, ISO/IEC JTC1 SC17 WG1 has been working on a sequence testing proposal from AFNOR/DIN since 2002. ANSI has been working with the sequence testing but is not encouraged because of inconsistent results and lack of any correlation with the Xavier results. Meanwhile, WG1 seems to be paying little attention to the existing ANSI work; thus, WG1 continues to move along slowly.

Getting back to the AFNOR results. The two-year financial card is the standard card application for which minimum requirements were established. The AFNOR results certainly suggest that the ISO/IEC minimum requirements are inadequate for IC cards. Even the 2% return rate is probably unacceptable for most card issuers, especially those in the USA. Therefore, I believe ISO/IEC JTC1 SC17 WG4 needs to re-examine their minimum requirements and beef up or add criteria along with additional test methods.

The card industry has a plethora of materials and processes available to meet nearly any card requirement. Our industry is indeed fortunate to have such a variety of materials development aimed towards satisfying the needs of our customers. The selection of materials and processes has trade-offs. It is important that we have the necessary tools to evaluate the trade-offs in a consistent manner that is beneficial to our customers.