Canada's Smart Card Deal With China

Canada's Smart Card Deal With China. System used for

driver's identification, traffic control, fines payment and

could incorporate fingerprints for higher security.

Ray Van Eng (10/21/96)

China, one of the biggest market in the world is not only opening itself up for trade with other countries, it is also looking towards new and advance technologies to alleviate some of the problems that they have in their daily lives. That ought to mean some very substantial business opportunities to the high technology sector in Canada and some Canadian firms are heeding the call.

BIT Inc. of Markham, ON is looking forward to sell its smart card technology to Shanxi, a central province in China that has a chronic traffic problem. The contract which worths about U.S.$10 Million is a direct result of a personal contact between BIT's president Eugene Lo and Chinese officials during a business trip to Asia.

"Obviously, the most populated country in the world is China. So if you can sell a product to a mass population, you have a tremendous opportunity," Lo commented.

The first time BIT's smart card system being implemented in China was in the province of Guangxi in the southern part of the country. BIT's smart card is the readable/writeable variety used mainly to store digital information which can be anywhere from 1K to 64K bits of data.

With the BIT system in place, motorists in the two Chinese provinces are required to carry the smart cards like a personal driver's license. When being stopped for a traffic violation, the driver would have to forward the smart card to the traffic cop who would use a card reader/writer to access information stored in the card, issue an electronic ticket right on the spot with the fines and other information embedded into the smart card chip itself. When the driver goes to the bank to pay his/her fines, the penalty will be deducted from the memory chip.

In the future, BIT intended to improve the system with the capability to store physical bodily features such as fingerprint or eye retina patterns (please see our article 'Password: your fingerprint please' for details) for a more positive identification.

Could the same technology be used in Canada? Yes, says Richard Chambers, BIT's senior consultant. Jennifer D'Angelo, director of licensing and control branch of the Ontario's Ministry of Transportation (MOT) agreed. But for MOT, the issue is "the infrastructure of the readers."

In order to accommodate smart cards, the magnetic stripe card readers that MOT is using now has to be replaced. That could be an expensive proposition and the true cost will not be known until the smart card market becomes more mature. Right now, the smart card industry does not even have a single standard that all vendors would agree on.

However, D'Angelo indicates that the upgrade to smart card technology could occur in three years time. By then, BIT would have to compete with some big players the likes of IBM, EDS, Datacard Corp. and others who are offering similar products.

"The government likes big companies behind the products. If we can grow big enough in three or four years, then we will stand a very good chance of getting a good piece of the action," noted BIT vice- president Ernest Cheung.

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