PARTNER NEWS: The acquisition of Antelop Solutions by Entrust will enable the development of more comprehensive solutions for the issuance of both digital and physical payment cards and offer customers “true digital-first payment credentials with physical card synergies that fully align with consumer expectations for simplicity and security,” the companies have revealed.

Following the acquisition in September 2021, Antelop’s One Digital Card SDK has already been released as the Entrust Digital Card Solution for banks and card issuing processors seeking to offer their customers an instant digital-first experience.

The integration of identity verification features that leverage Entrust’s instant identity issuance technology will be among one of the first additions to the digital-first solution with other integrations to follow as part of an ongoing process of “product acceleration”.

“The future of the Digital Card Solution is to add more and more features,” Entrust (Antelop) vice president of digital payment solutions Nicholas Bruley, founder of Antelop, explained in a webinar outlining future plans, which is now available to watch on demand.

Product evolution

“There are lots of features we can talk about — buy now, pay later, instalments, data analysis, advanced card control — and that could evolve to other forms of payments such as cryptos.”

In addition, the merger allows the company to offer customers card issuance solutions that combine the digital-first technology developed by Antelop with the Entrust instant physical card issuance solution that allows banks and card issuers to securely print payment cards for individual customers on their premises or via an ATM.

“One of the reasons we decided to join Entrust is that the solution we can build together is very interesting,” Bruley explained.

“Entrust is the world expert on instant issuance and in this future world, at Antelop, we are 100% focused on digital, but we all know here that in the payment industry, the plastic card will still live a very long time because it still has a lot of use cases and it works well, and many, many people will still want to have plastic cards.

“So the bank will for many, many years still need to have plastic cards, so the idea really is to converge this digital issuance — where we have an expertise at Antelop — with the physical issuance that Entrust provides — and combining those very important goals of simplicity and security.

“And because Entrust and Antelop share the same culture of security, we can build together, design together something that will greatly improve the simplicity of integration, and we think we can reach a really outstanding solution together and for me that’s one of the most important points.”

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