Amadis and Intertrust Drive the Next-Generation of Contactless Payments

Amadis-Intertrust Partnership Overview: A discussion with Bohdan Myroniw, Chief Strategic Officer of Amadis and Andrew Snyder, Head of Global Sales, whiteCryption

Amadis would like to announce the selection of Intertrust as a key strategic partner in the whitecryption space.  As the partnership has been confirmed, we sat down with representatives from both Intertrust and Amadis to discuss the strengths of each in the partnerships, future project highlights and a sharing of like-strategies for the future of payments.

Why did you decide to work together?  And before answering that, can you both provide a company overview. 

(BM) Amadis is a software company; we are known as a software editor in the reg tech field, operating primarily in highly regulated payment processing environments. If you could imagine the rules that underline Visa, MasterCard, Amex, and Discover - all with how to deal with how to process electronic payments. We focus our software development efforts for OEM partners. I can’t mention names, but you are probably using one of our 40 million plus kernels that are deployed somewhere around the globe - in transit, retail, grocery, or at a petroleum lane.

We are embedded very much at the low level at payment terminals. And more recently with Amadis One, which is the ability to enable smart phones that function as a commercial off the shelf device - either as a smartphone, tablet or other android-based device that becomes a terminal for contactless EMV transactions. So, whether you tap with your card, your mobile wallet, within a smartphone, or with a wearable you’re able to take advantage of new smartphones and tablets that have NFC capabilities, and be able to accept contactless EMV payments.

We partnered with Intertrust because of their expertise, and their intellectual property. When we build solutions like Amadis One, security requirements are really primordial - no different than a payment terminal. We cannot have someone tamper with payment software that is running in an android smartphone environment. 

We go to great extent to meet the security requirements of card brands that are put in front of us. We’ve taken those steps to address risks in the marketplace by taking advantage of Intertrust’s whitebox cryptography and all of their code protection and tools to be able to provide a secure environment that we can attest and monitor in real time - no different from someone taking a screwdriver to a payment terminal. 

We’re able to protect our software in that manner from tampers and detect tampers when they occur, so that we can protect the integrity of the whole payment processing infrastructure.

Andrew, same question for you: Why did you decide to work with Amadis? And company overview, please.

(AS) Intertust, the whitecryption group that we’re a part of, is a software company based in California, with offices around the world. Our primary reason for being is for protecting code, such as the Amadis One solution, as well as the cryptographic keys inside of those use cases that really - really can’t be exploited or manipulated. 

We provide tools and solutions that software developers work with, to protect their hardware, to protect their intellectual property, to protect whatever it is that they've built so they can have confidence going to the market that their code, their software will work as designed and delivered. 

The whitecryption product group is part of a larger organization called Intertrust. Intertrust has been around for 30-years, and we have our roots in the digital rights management space and have owned and protected that for the past 30-years, working with the largest companies in the world that do video streaming. From all that research and effort, we’ve created a number of use cases and tools that are really applicable to a number of areas, including finance, healthcare, payments, automobile, and the energy space. There’s really a wide number of places where our tools get implemented.

One of the reasons we were so interested in working with Emmanuel, Bohdan and the Amadis team, is that they are taking a very physical tangible terminal, that’s all around the world and converting it to digital. Converting it for modern, contactless payments. It just so happened that Covid occurred, and dramatically accelerated that over the last year.

We joined with Amadis because they are doing something revolutionary and tackling this market globally, and we see ourselves supporting those sorts of businesses. At this point we’ve had some good success and we are looking to build on that throughout 2021.

This is the first part of a multi-series interview.

Stay tuned for updates, with commentary on key industry trends and developments.