Enabling the next wave of innovation in financial services

By Gil Bernabeu, CTO, GlobalPlatform

The evolution of payments and financial services can be traced through technological innovations, consumer behavior and changes in the threat landscape.

The rise of magnetic stripe encoding technology in the 1960s and ‘70s sought to alleviate the costs and risks of managing cash, while increasing convenience for cardholders. EMV® chip cards addressed rising fraud since the mid ‘90s with dynamic cryptography. Next, contactless cards helped drive greater speed and convenience for cardholders and the 2010s heralded the start of the ‘wallet wars’.

Similarly, since the first online transactions in the mid ‘90s, transaction volumes have increased exponentially seeing both technology and fraud become more sophisticated. The subsequent roll out of Card Verification Value (CVV) checks, payment tokenization, multi-factor authentication like 3-D Secure and more have served to both protect transactions and boost the user experience.

Today, consumers continue to demand speed, convenience and flexibility in how and where they transact. Payment card innovations work to enrich the user experience while safeguarding cardholders. These innovations, like embedding displays or biometrics, are making our payment cards more like a complex computer. And the overall digital transformation of finance is seeing concepts like central bank digital currencies (CBDC), holistic digital wallets and payments passkeys become a reality.

All of these technologies and solutions have been driven by collaborative innovation and underpinned by standardization efforts. As GlobalPlatform has always been the cornerstone of security and privacy supporting the financial services industry, we continue to bring the industry together. Our financial services workshop in March 2025 discusses emerging trends, recent developments in GlobalPlatform technologies and next steps required to future-proof the industry.

But how has the technology evolved and how can financial services stakeholder ensure their requirements are being met?

Evolving payments use cases, evolving standards

Extensive work over the past year has integrated key updates from the financial services community into the soon-to-be-published GlobalPlatform SE Specification. Our specifications comprehensively define the universal functionalities and security features for the associated technology, in this case SEs. They therefore outline all the possibilities on offer (think of them as an inventory of everything you have in your fridge before starting cooking!).

The latest version of the specification incorporates several key updates that will support the work of the financial services ecosystem.

• Digital wallet enablement – with trends like digital identity wallets and central bank digital currencies (CBDC) proliferating, the specification supports new deployment models, enabling third-parties to deploy and protect their services and applications in the SEs that are present in today’s smartphones.

• Supporting payment card evolution – innovation in the banking card market is moving as quickly as ever and the new specification incorporates new APIs to support cards enabled with new component (like LEDs, displays and biometrics).

• Updated security – EMVCo has been working to roll out the C8 Contactless Kernel Specification the past couple of years to significantly streamline the development, testing and launch of new contactless payment terminals. Amongst other things, the specification is bolstering cryptographic agility to support new cryptographic functions. This document is expected to be published mid-2025 and the SE Committee will continue to identify the latest industry requirements to evolve the specification.

Now that this is available, it is our Financial Configuration that presents tangible opportunities for the financial services community over the coming months and years.

Extracting the ‘Recipe’ for Financial Services from the GlobalPlatform Specification

Our configurations define the specific card specification functions and features that are relevant to a particular market, and how they should be implemented in line with key use cases. (Using the same analogy as above, configurations are the recipe that’s tried, tested and loved by the whole family!).

The Financial Configuration, therefore, is the key reference point for banking, payments, wearable, digital wallet and other stakeholders seeking to protect their devices and services with SEs. It is also the basis upon which products are certified for use in financial services use cases, confirming that all functional requirements of the configuration are present and behaving as intended.

Call for configuration contributions

Now that the new specification is complete, the next step is to bring the financial services community together to collaborate on updating the Financial Configuration. Redefining the configuration will:

• Ensure it is aligned with stakeholders’ latest requirements and innovation roadmaps to enable deployment of new products and features.

• Bring consistency in how technology and services are deployed, secured and managed in the rapidly evolving financial services ecosystem.

• Simplify procurement, compliance, certification processes between stakeholders. With the presence of a universally agreed baseline document, collaboration between payment schemes, technology vendors, banks and other stakeholders will be simpler and smoother.

• Enable the consistent development of cutting-edge products that can be seamlessly integrated into devices and used to host innovative applications and services.

GlobalPlatform’s CTO, in collaboration with the organization’s SE Committee, will engage directly with the global payment schemes and other stakeholders to participate in shaping the new configuration. If you would like to participate in this work, please contact me.