The mission of Speacq is to bring contactless bankcard technology
to U.S. public transport systems.
Privately held, Speacq was founded in January 2004 in an effort
to develop the acceptance of contactless bankcards directly at U.S.
transit gates and fareboxes. The project continues the work of Smart
Systems Co., LLC, a company formed to market certain contactless
bankcard patents acquired in Korea in late 2004 after a year's research
by the principals.
Market
Transit agencies in the U.S. have been moving away from magnetic-stripe
to contactless cards. Recently, major U.S. banks have started to
issue contactless bankcards on a large scale. While the agencies
want to offload card issuance and management to the financial industry,
the issuers want the card distinctiveness and top-of-wallet effect
given by transit use. To unite the two industires, an anti-fraud
solution is necessary.
Speacq was specifically formed to develop and deliver solutions
based on offline authorization. It licenses U.S. patent #5828044
from Smart Systems, covering the offline authorization of credit
card transactions using a negative list. Seoul’s public transit
has been using a credit card-based AFC system since 1996. Eight Korean
financial institutions have issued nearly 30 million transit bankcards to date, which have become the main form of transit pass in
Seoul’s subways, buses and taxis.
Speacq's Solution
The solution consists of a redundant, self-healing environment featuring
strong security, a carrier-class wide area network, redundant load
balanced servers, and user authentication and transactional systems,
all of which combined enable contactless bankcards for transit use. Utilizing
the skills and knowledge of business analysts, subject area experts,
information scientists, system architects and analysts and the best
coders, the resulting solution is extremely secure and scalable high
volume system that delivers simplicity and ease of use to end-users.
