At the heart of the Thales Gémenos factory, the bank card continues to reinvent itself

PVC plates, spools of gold wire and thousands of chips scattered on a disc in the evening, so many personalized bank cards ready to leave the next morning: this is the tour de force achieved every night in the Thales factory in Gémenos , in Bouches-du-Rhône.

Over the years, payment cards, ever more numerous, have become more secure and sophisticated, explains Amélie Tournant, responsible for strategy for banking and payment solutions within Thalès, as she shows AFP around the manufacturing site.

“Innovation in the payment industry is very important, it always has been and it remains so,” she insists.

After a brief reminder of the figure of Roland Moreno, the whimsical French inventor and “father” of the smart card in the 1970s, the manager evokes the technological advances of the last fifteen years, raising her voice to drown out the noise of the machines.

Contactless payment, cryptogram (the three numbers often on the back of the bank card) changing automatically at regular intervals, integration of a fingerprint reader, scanning of cards in smartphones… the list goes on.

Around her, dozens of operators in white coats monitor the industrial progress of the factory.

Here we assemble modules, these small golden rectangles similar to SIM cards containing the famous chip, sewn with ultra-fine gold thread and frozen in resin. There they are attached to cards, marked with the name and unique number of each customer. There they are slipped into envelopes or cardboard boxes before sending.

– Card for the visually impaired –

It is also in Gémenos, located around twenty kilometers from Marseille, that engineers are seeking in their laboratory to do away with plastic or to miniaturize new components.

For example, they are at the origin of a card, marketed today by several regional banks of Crédit Agricole, allowing the visually impaired to “hear” a transaction at their merchant, to make their lives easier and prevent them from being victims of fraud.

This card contains a miniaturized Bluetooth component which sends all the information (amount entered by the merchant on the payment terminal, success or failure of entering the PIN code and the transaction) to their phone. They just need to plug in headphones to know them in real time.

Another department adjoining the factory is responsible for mechanical tests and subjects the worst tortures – pressure, bending in all directions – to new products, in order to test their solidity over time.

“The bank card market is doing well,” assures Ms. Tournant, thanks to “new players in payment, digital banks, who have chosen to issue this physical support (…) in addition to digital services” .

Countries that are still poorly banked and mature markets where the number of cards per capita continues to increase also push back the day of the peak in the number of cards manufactured, inevitable in the face of the development of mobile payment.

– Perpetual evolution –

The Thales branch “Identity and digital services”, less known than that of the group dedicated to defense, delivers a billion bank cards each year to some 3,500 financial institutions around the world. Enough to make this entity, resulting from the acquisition of Gemalto and which also produces SIM cards for mobile telephony and identity documents, the world number one in this market.

The company intends to defend its market share in the digital world, facing ambitious competitors like Apple or Google.

One of the chips in our smartphones “is dedicated to protecting credit card type applications”, recalls Rémy Belloir, France sales director of Thalès Identity and digital services, “it is inside this small hyper-protected chip, inside the phone, which houses the dematerialized bank card.

The company is also developing digital services for its major clients, such as a form allowing individuals to order a new card directly via their banking application, with the added bonus of publishing a virtual card that can be used immediately and until receipt of the card. physical map.

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