TRUSTECH 2025—the Big Talking Points, the Areas of Market Focus, and What It Means

With 2025 quickly drawing to a close, TRUSTECH 2025 proved a pivotal exhibition/conference for discussing not only the latest and greatest innovations within the smart card realms, but also a platform for industry to discuss the pain points and trends that will set the tone throughout 2026.

General Smart Card Market Indicators

It was abundantly clear that the smart card market is still recovering from a number of post-COVID-19 lingering effects, and these challenges continued to dominate our discussions.

Overstocking and high levels of inventory is persisting—higher than usual sales in 2023, driven by the chip shortage coming to an end, significantly reduced demand throughout 2024 and a continuation of high levels of stocking has evidently been persistent throughout 2025.

At the same time, significant pricing pressures are returning to the market, another area of key concern. If pricing continues on a significant downward trend, then foundry appeal could diminish, with the ultimate result begin foundries prioritizing higher-margined chipset solutions for manufacture, thus potentially creating another chip shortage within the smart card market.

This is now becoming a political battleground and a balancing act between supply chain security and a guaranteed continuation of supply, against a backdrop of pressures on Integrated Circuit (IC) Average Selling Prices (ASPs), which may diminish and/or lower foundry variability to continue manufacturing.

Sustainability

The largest and most prominent topic was related to sustainability within the payment cards market. Everybody had a solution, whether addressing the market from a material or componentry perspective.

However, despite everyone’s best efforts, cards made from sustainable materials do not possess the same characteristics as first-use plastics, which ultimately hinders quality and finish. However, there is a clear need for specific sustainable messaging, targeting issuers and setting expectations related to quality. There will continue to be a tradeoff between slightly lower personalization abilities versus achieving sustainability goals, and these imperfections need to be accepted and embraced. The industry as a whole, with the analyst community included, has a role to play in pushing this message out to help further educate issuers on the required trade-offs in order to meet self-imposed sustainable goals and initiatives.

Innovative Payment Cards

The industry is beginning to accept that the biometric payment card market has little mass issuance opportunity remaining. High pricing and enrollment issues, paired with a strategy of marketing as a product rather than a solution has hindered adoption. A continued increase in contactless transaction limits and use of mobile wallets are other contributing factors that continue to hinder uptake. For the biometric payment card, 2026 will likely mark the year whereby it moves from a technology targeting mass issuance opportunity to one of showcase.  

Dynamic Card Verification Value Card (dCVV) remained a prevalent technology on show, but industry uncertainty is beginning to creep in related to the potential success it can achieve. The cost and time requirements to upgrade and adjust back-end systems to accept dCVV transactions has been significantly underestimated, and mobile alternatives and tokenization are other competing technologies that could derail dCVV adoption. The next 12 months will be critical for the commercial viability of the technology and some significant scaling of adoption must be realized in order for the technology to remain in the market.

PQC

Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) was another standout topic, arising in the majority of our industry discussions. Although it is very early days for the penetration of this technology through smart card markets, it is clear that PQC is of top-most corporate strategic priority. Given the transversal nature of PQC, strategies and activities largely remain at the corporate level today, with a need to coordinate and prioritize across market verticals, but business unit-specific plans will likely begin in 2026.

Since 2020, the market has been going through a series of significant changes. Despite COVID-19 happening over 5 years ago, the market hasn’t really recovered. Although not all the challenges have been a direct result of COVID-19, many are indirect COVID-19 impacts, some of which continue to plague smart card markets to this day.

The fallout has driven concerns related to further market consolidation, lack of potential growth, and degrading ASPs. Today, all ecosystem players are focusing efforts on high-value card niches as the market becomes a revenue margins battle ground.

Other market dynamics, including the transition from Removable Subscriber Identity Module (rSIM) to Embedded SIM (eSIM) and an expectation that payment issuers will begin to look toward payment card expiry extension, which will ultimately reduce the market’s Total Addressable Market (TAM) are other contributing factors to keep an eye on throughout 2026.

Although people often talk about mobile being the greatest threat to the physical card, the actual danger is coming from several other factors, some of which are lingering impacts from COVID-19. Policies like those impacting Chinese vendors continue to  have an effect on the global playing field, forcing Chinese vendors to look further afield, creating a more competitive environment and a revenue race to the bottom driven by aggressive pricing strategies.