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Gemalto NV said Thursday it will supply chip cards that will enable university students in Brazil to make retail purchases and to access such buildings as libraries and laboratories. The cards will go to Banco Santander for its "university identity card" scheme, the France-based card vendor says in a statement. The MasterCard-branded cards carry the global EMV antifraud standard, and Gemalto claims the card is the first in Brazil to combine EMV with multiple applications. CardLine Global could not confirm that claim. The bank already has begun distributing the cards to students at Anhanguera, a private school in the state of São Paulo. Students at Universidade Estadual de Campinas, a public university also known as Unicamp, also could take part in the program. Gemalto expects some 100,000 students to have the cards by the end of the year. The cards will replace magnetic stripe cards that enable access to university buildings. The access function on the new cards is contactless, a Gemalto spokesperson tells CardLine Global. The cards also function as contact debit cards that students can use at on- and off-campus merchants, the spokesperson says. The Java-based cards have chips with 36 kilobytes of memory, the spokesperson says.
