ARX Provides PolCard with PrivateServer - HSM for EMV Payment-Card Processing

ARX, a leading developer of electronic signatures and data security solutions, today announced that it will supply its leading HSM solution, PrivateServer/EMV, to PolCard S.A. PolCard is the leading debit and credit card merchant transaction acquirer and processor company in Poland, with a nationwide retail network of 40.000 point-of-sale terminals. PolCard is migrating their card-issuing system to support EMV, a new standard for payment-card processing. ARX will supply PolCard with PrivateServer/EMV servers to support the cryptography operations needed, according to the EMV standard, in the issuing of new cards and transaction verification.

PrivateServer/EMV is ARX's high performance Hardware Security Module (HSM) targeted at the financial market. PrivateServer/EMV serves both as a card-issuing system, used for various data-generation activities, and as an authentication system, in which case it secures financial and payment transactions and is used for PIN (Personal Identification Number) verification, both in the legacy magnetic stripe environment and in the new EMV standard.

PolCard provides for many banks in Poland card-issuing services, including payment- cards issuing, card’s personalization, authorization, fraud monitoring, customer service, disputes processing, on-line connection with bank systems, remote access to PolCard system, and will soon add to its services EMV card issuing. The process of issuing EMV cards requires special cryptography used for digital signatures and for key generation. ARX's PrivateServer/EMV provides PolCard with these capabilities as it supports issuing cards and it support both the SDA and the DDA authentication methods. It is capable of both RSA signing and fast key-pair generation. 

“PrivateServer/EMV is the fastest Hardware Security Module available on the market, capable of verifying 1,800 TPS (Transactions Per Second) and creating up to 150 electronic signatures per second in the issuing phase”, says Motty Alon, VP of Marketing for ARX, “These superior performance abilities would allow PolCard systems to cope with peak traffic times, while preserving cost effectiveness as it requires less HSMs at each site.”

"As the leading card issuer and transaction processor company in Poland, we needed a highly secure, high-performance HSM for the issuing of EMV cards", says Zbigniew Rzepka, an IT Director at PolCard, “When examining several HSM solutions, we were impressed with PrivateServer/EMV’s wide selection of operating systems support, including Linux, on which our system runs, and the superior level of security underwritten by the FIPS 140-1 Level 3 certification that PrivateServer/EMV has”.

PrivateServer/EMV is already installed at dozens of financial organizations worldwide including leading banks and payment-card companies in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Israel, and across Europe.