Gemalto Card Issuer Platform to Help Transition Ghana to EMV Payments

“The platform is designed to enable private label card issuers as well as domestic schemes to issue their own payment cards independently of other institutions. “

A Gemalto platform will help to transition Ghana’s payments economy to EMV transactions.

The company has announced that Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems (GhIPSS), a subsidiary of the country’s central bank, will adopt its PURE payments solution to support card issuance, and that the organizations have worked together to establish issuance and acceptance specifications to ensure that all cards issued on the platform will be compatible with all ATMs and POS terminals in the country.

The platform is designed to enable private label card issuers as well as domestic schemes to issue their own payment cards independently of other institutions. For example, the Gemalto system was embraced last summer by Spanish department store El Corte Inglés to help enable the retailer’s own custom payment cards on the mobile payments platform Samsung Pay.

In a statement, Gemalto CISMEA Banking and Payment SVP Nassir Ghrous explained that the collaboration “offers Ghanaian banks greater flexibility with their EMV​ migration strategies,” adding that GhIPSS will benefit from PURE’s scalability and its support for both contact-based and contactless cards.