MasterCard, Keycorp, Hitachi and Oak Hill Form Company to Expand MULTOS

Sydney, Nov 30, 2005 (ABN Newswire) - MasterCard International, Keycorp, Hitachi and Oak Hill Venture Partners (OHVP) today announced that they have completed a transaction to form a new company to expand MULTOS, one of the world's highest-security, open standard smart card platforms.

Under the agreement, the new holding company will acquire from MasterCard the intellectual property underlying MULTOS and the Global MULTOS Key Management Authority operation. The new entity will also assume management of London-based MAOSCO Ltd, the secretariat of the MULTOS Consortium which together with its 16 member companies will continue to develop MULTOS as an open standard smart card platform.

The new holding company will also have offices in San Francisco, Washington D.C. and Asia. John Wood, the former founder of Keycorp and Chairman of the MULTOS Consortium since 2001, will assume the position of CEO.

"This agreement opens up support for the MULTOS platform and provides new funding to develop and grow the business. MULTOS has enjoyed volume growth of over 50% per annum since its inception in 1997. The future prospects of the business have never looked better," said John Wood, MULTOS' CEO. "The new management team will allow MULTOS to maintain its strong position by continuing to develop unrivalled technology and by moving into important early adopter markets."

MasterCard, Keycorp, Hitachi and Oak Hill will play a key role in helping MULTOS to expand its presence beyond the financial smart card sector, where its technology is the leading open standard platform. MULTOS also enjoys a robust position among e-passport, enterprise security, mass transit and national identity smart card issuers where existing and current deployments include the Hong Kong Smart ID card, the Saudi National ID card, Japanese Residential ID card and the Turkish Military ID card.

The new management and investor group will enable MULTOS to fulfill the market's need for the authentication of consumer data. Leveraging MULTOS' secure environment and content management platform in a wider range of consumer devices (such as PCs, wireless PDAs and mobile phones), the new investment will allow MULTOS to expand its presence in securing environments for digital assets and services including secure computing, mobile communications and pay TV.

"MULTOS has made tremendous progress in the marketplace over the past few years. Its future success will now be optimised by opening its ownership to a broader group of companies in other industries," said Art Kranzley, Global Product Group Executive, Advanced Payments, MasterCard International. "MasterCard remains committed to supporting its MasterCard OneSmart? smart card program and to the worldwide deployment of the EMV chip standard on the MULTOS platform."

Keycorp, Chief Executive Officer, Bruce Thompson, said: "With a broader mandate and a strong presence in the US, we expect the new entity to drive a solid return on our investment over the next few years."
Hitachi's Executive Vice President and Executive Officer, Kazuo Furukawa, said, "MULTOS is a key element in Hitachi's growth strategy. It complements our strong ID solutions capability in Japan and overseas. Hitachi will continue to develop IT platform and solutions based on MULTOS key management."

"This is a smart, aggressive team of entrepreneurs," said Dave Brown, Managing Partner, Oak Hill Venture Partners. "The team combines strategic vision with global expertise in building and implementing trust environments on cards and devices. As an innovator and emerging leader in these environments, MULTOS will provide the foundation for extending trust services beyond web servers and into local domains."

About MULTOS
MULTOS is a highly secure multi-application smart card operating system specification supporting a wide range of applications including EMV, ID and other value-added applications. This open standard is managed and developed by MAOSCO - a consortium of the world's leading smart card companies - and is the only commercial operating system to attain the security requirements of ITSEC E6-high. (ITSEC is an independent and rigorous security evaluation scheme supported by more than 14 countries worldwide, whose results are openly published.) Third party software developers provide a broad catalogue of MULTOS applications and value-added services for card users and issuers that can be deployed consistently across all implementations of MULTOS. As of now, over 50 million MULTOS smart cards have been issued in over 30 countries, in projects ranging from Banking, National Identity, Campus, Secure ID and Transit.

About Oakhill Venture Partners:
Oak Hill Venture Partners (OHVP) invests in companies that are pioneering innovative technologies and the businesses these technologies enable. Our mandate is to provide early and emerging stage companies that have strong operating management teams with a solid financial and strategic foundation on which to grow and develop. The firm was established by Robert M. Bass and his investment partners in 1997. [OHVP remains self-funded, which gives it the flexibility to maintain a long-term investment horizon and closely align its investment goals with its entrepreneurs. In addition to providing capital, OHVP is able to leverage proprietary relationships from across the Oak Hill network, giving entrepreneurs access to potential allies, strategic partners and customers in new and traditional businesses - especially in the financial services market.]