Palm Beach, FL 6/7/12 (StreetBeat) -- Some companies have a lot of articles written about them and littered across the web for reasons that aren’t necessarily fundamental to the company’s developments. In the case of SmartMetric, the majority of literature on the web recently is all about the patent infringement lawsuits that the company has filed against American Express (NYSE:AXP), Visa(NYSE:V) and Mastercard (NYSE:MA). SmartMetric Inc. (OTCBB:SMME) alleges that the majors are in violation of their patent number 6,792,464 titled “System for Automatic Connection to a Network” which was issued in September 2004. SmartMetric has been tenaciously fighting the large credit card companies via three lawsuits over the last two years over technology uses related to contact card systems and credit card readers. The much smaller company has not backed-down against its bigger peers and has received favorable judgments so far as Amex, Visa and MC continue to try and have the cases dismissed. The fact that a victory in those cases could potentially reap a windfall for SmartMetrics is certainly a headline and could be a game changer for the value of SMME, but those cases are still only a side bar and “possibility” that investors can’t necessarily hang their hats on. The company still has day-to-day business to conduct in order to build-out their core competencies and generate revenue aside from the litigation.
Over the last decade, the company has developed the SmartMetric, Biometric Card Computer which provides powerful computing with large memory capacity in a revolutionary size. Utilizing cutting-edge sub micro technology electronics, the company has achieved a level of miniaturization that allows it to release a solution of portable computing power that, combined with SmartMetric's biometric fingerprint in-card scanning technology, could change the dynamics of the way business is done and information is handled across many industries.
Today, the company reported that it has secured $1 million in financing from private investors for working capital to complete its production facilities in Buenos Aires, where the company will install key robotic assembly equipment. This will finalize SmartMetric's full-scale manufacturing capabilities of its enhanced fingerprint activated EMV Cards.
So what’s EMV? According to smartcardalliance.org, “EMV is an open-standard set of specifications for smart card payments and acceptance devices. The EMV specifications were developed to define a set of requirements to ensure interoperability between chip-based payment cards and terminals. EMV chip cards contain embedded microprocessors that provide strong transaction security features and other application capabilities not possible with traditional magnetic stripe cards.”
In the U.S., we may not know a great deal about EMV cards, but the migration will be coming soon as more and more countries across the globe, currently 80 of them, including Canada, are making the transition to EMV as a standard because of its benefits of thwarting fraud and counterfeiting. As of September 2011, more than 1.3 billion cards were issued and nearly 21 million POS terminals had been changed to accept EMV cards. That’s nearly half of all payment cards out there today and three-quarters of all POS terminals in the world. Clearly, EMV is going to be huge.
With the completion of the facility, SmartMetric is aligning itself quite well in the space. "With the recent Appeals Court ruling on the SmartMetric Patent Law Suit against Visa and MasterCard favoring SmartMetric on EMV contact cards, SmartMetric is in a position to corner the market on nearly every EMV credit or debit card issued and to be issued in the U.S. -- already 1.5 million -- as well as new business opportunities worldwide," said Chaya Hendrick, President & CEO, SmartMetric in today’s corporate news.
Because SmartMetric's solutions combine two advanced technologies into one card, giving them a competitive edge over less secure "chip and PIN" model that comprise the EMV cards today. The combined solution could become the working standard in the mid-term as the shift to more secure payment processing and identification edges toward replacing legacy technologies.
Shares of SMME continue to hover in the area of 20 cents with intermittent spikes on news from the lawsuits. As developments continue within corporate walls to build and brand its products for a full-scale roll-out, shares could appreciate on their own with the lawsuits potentially serving as a major catalysts on any final verdicts. Proper due diligence is, as always, encouraged.
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