TRUSTECH 2025: Smart Card Market Needs Creativity Across the Supply Chain

ABI Research analysts attend TRUSTECH annually, discussing the latest innovations and sharing updates on the smart card market. This year, attendees mentioned to us a perceived lack of anything major and “new” at the show, although the focus had shifted to payment cards and sustainability compared to previous iterations. Vendors are under pressure to find new ways to differentiate and adopt new niches in a mature and challenged market, and creativity is required across technological, commercial, and marketing strategies.

While innovations are occurring, there is an element of being stuck in old ways of thinking. Taking wood cards, for example—all recognize their place in the market in the face of sustainability goals and requirements to create differentiated, higher-margin payment card products. However, the desire to treat it as a one-to-one material replacement leads to complaints around personalization, with plastic films being required to recreate color printing capability and quality failing to match up to entrenched expectations. On the chip and smart card side, the issue is showcasing new capabilities and seeking methods of distribution that allow innovations to create niche impact without the mass volumes required by more traditional supply architectures.

Infineon’s prominent nail salon pop-up booth exemplified the possibilities for non-traditional approaches. Working in partnership with DIGISEQ and Smart Chip, Infineon offers a payment chip on a flexible, adhesive film. The footprint, complete with antenna, is small and malleable enough to be applied to a thumbnail—which is exactly how they delivered it at the show. With gel nail polish applied over the top by the nail technicians trained in correct application, the chip lasts on the nail for the duration of the polish—on average, around 6 weeks. Smart Chip specializes in this form factor, training nail technicians and distributing the chips via these specially-trained salon staff, providing a payment method that cannot be stolen or lost. The result is a low-saturation differentiated upsell for the salon, an outlet for chips for the manufacturers, and potential growth in transactions for payment handlers.

On the back end, numerous banks and supporting infrastructure players—notably Curve, which provides a specialist payment wallet allowing for re-attribution of payments to linked bank cards—result in a flexible open-loop experience with good accessibility in Western Europe. The Curve integration is particularly interesting, as its partnership with Fidesmo—the Swedish company providing the Near Field Communication (NFC) platform that links with participating Mastercard issuers to provide support for open-loop payment wearables, with Curve providing a consumer-facing super-app allowing for convenient management of linked cards—creates a single point of entry in a market traditionally hampered by the slower, disaggregated approach of bank-by-bank rollout of support. While Smart Chip’s embedded nail payments will remain niche, this Curve-Fidesmo-Mastercard infrastructure ecosystem provides opportunities for a number of other markets—with payment-enabled rings, sold direct to consumers by Tapster, Astari, and cnick, among many others, being a leading form factor.

Across the rings, nail-embedded, and other wearable form factors, the need to create strong partnerships is clear, with a strongly integrated ecosystem being essential to the seamless distribution and support of new products. Novel solutions in the payment market must challenge deeply entrenched customer habits, and getting exciting innovations in front of customers with a frictionless onboarding process requires excellent cooperation across the supply chain.

Similarly, the challenge of personalization in the wooden cards market may be ameliorated with a more collaborative approach. Rather than providing printing requests with expectations borrowed from the plastic market, issuers will need to explore the unique properties of wooden cards, and integrate them into their branding. Materials suppliers will need to be adaptable, addressing the challenges of scaling the industry and identifying which characteristics can be accepted in a context of ambitions for larger volume issuance, the need to use existing infrastructure and hardware wherever possible, and the need to provide features to enable life spans comparable, if not commensurate, to plastic with expiration date policies becoming increasingly extended.