Joan Daemen is a Belgian cryptographer who is currently professor of digital security at Radboud University. He co-designed with Vincent Rijmen the Rijndael cipher, which was selected as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in 2001. More recently, he co-designed the Keccak cryptographic hash, which was selected as the new SHA-3 hash by NIST in October 2012. He has also designed or co-designed the MMB, Square, SHARK, NOEKEON, 3-Way, and BaseKing block ciphers. In 2017 he won the Levchin Prize for Real World Cryptography "for the development of AES and SHA3". He describes his development of encryption algorithms as creating the bricks which are needed to build the secure foundations online.
Atos SE is a French multinational information technology (IT) service and consulting company with headquarters in Bezons, France, and offices worldwide. It specialises in hi-tech transactional services, unified communications, cloud, big data and cybersecurity services. Atos operates worldwide under the brands Atos, Atos|Syntel, Atos Consulting, Atos Healthcare, Atos Worldgrid, Groupe Bull, Canopy, Eviden, Maven Wave, and Unify.
Fortis, formally Fortis N.V./S.A., was a Benelux-centered global financial services group active in insurance, banking and investment management, initially formed in 1990 by a three-way Belgian-Dutch merger and headquartered in Brussels. It grew rapidly through multiple acquisitions, and in 2007 was the 20th largest financial services business in the world by revenue. It was listed on the Euronext Brussels, Euronext Amsterdam, and Luxembourg stock exchanges.
KBC Group N.V. is a Belgian universal multi-channel bank-insurer, focusing on private clients and small and medium-sized enterprises in Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia. It was created in 1998 through the merger of Kredietbank (KB), the cooperative CERA Bank, ABB Insurance, and Fidelitas Insurance. The acronym KBC stands for KredietBank and CERA.
Chipknip was a stored-value payment card system used in the Netherlands. Based on the Belgian Proton system, it was started by Interpay on 26 October 1995, as a pilot project in the city of Arnhem and a year later rolled out countrywide. Chipknip was taken over by Currence due to a restructuring on 17 May 2005, who managed it with their licensees until its discontinuation on 1 January 2015. The Chipknip was primarily used for small retail transactions, as the card could contain a maximum value of 500 euros. The money needed to be transferred from a card holders main bank account using a loading station which were generally located next to ATMs.
EPAS was a European non-commercial cooperation initiative which developing a series of data protocols to be applied in a point of sale (POS) environment. This included the protocols used by payment terminals and card payment systems. The project focused on three protocols; a terminal management protocol, a retailer application protocol and an acquirer protocol.
Ingenico is a French merchant services technology company, that facilitates secure electronic transactions. The company expanded as a manufacturer of point of sale (POS) payment terminals to also include complete merchant payment SaaS and related services.
HP/De Tijd is a Dutch language monthly opinion magazine. Its editorial offices are in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Alongside De Groene Amsterdammer, Vrij Nederland and Elsevier, it is one of the most influential Dutch opinion magazines.
SIX is a key financial market infrastructure company in Switzerland. The company provides services relating to securities transactions, the processing of financial information, payment transactions and is building a digital infrastructure. The company name SIX is an abbreviation and stands for Swiss Infrastructure and Exchange. SIX is globally active, with its headquarters in Zurich.
Proton was an electronic purse application for debit cards in Belgium. The system was introduced in February 1995 with the goal to replace cash primarily for small transactions around € 15. For security, the card was limited to storing 125 EUR of available electronic cash.
equensWorldline SE is a payment card and payment processor headquartered in Utrecht, Netherlands which serves the European market. Since 2019, it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Worldline. As of 2020, equensWorldline had additional branch offices in Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and sales representatives in the UK.
Apache PDFBox is an open source pure-Java library that can be used to create, render, print, split, merge, alter, verify and extract text and meta-data of PDF files.
Worldline SA is a French fintech founded in 1972 and the world’s number 4 payments leader.
Nexi S.p.A. formerly known as Istituto Centrale delle Banche Popolari Italiane S.p.A. (ICBPI) is an Italian bank that specialises in payment systems such as Nexi Payments. The bank was specialised as a central institution of Italian Popular Bank.
PayconiqInternational S.A. is a Luxembourg-based company developing a mobile payment and payment processing platform, active in Luxembourg and Belgium. Since October 2023, it has been controlled by The European Payments Initiative (EPI).
Interpay Nederland was the Dutch payment processor and payment product provider that operated from 1994 until 2006. Interpay owned the payment systems PIN, Chipknip, Acceptgiro and Incasso. The organisation was owned by a consortium of Dutch banks. In 2005, they spun off Currence which in 2006 merged with German company Transaktionsinstitut für Zahlungsverkehrsdienstleistungen AG to form Equens.
Bancontact Payconiq Company was formed following the merger of Bancontact Company and Payconiq Belgium. The company is the Belgian market leader in financial services. Company headquarters are in Brussels, Belgium.
Gilles Grapinet, born July 3, 1963, in Aix-en-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône), is a French businessman.
The European Payments Initiative (EPI), previously known as the Pan-European Payments System Initiative (PEPSI), is a unified digital payment service backed by 16 European banks and payment service providers. Its aim is to allow European consumers and merchants to make next-generation payments for all types of person-to-person transfers and retail transactions via a digital wallet, called Wero. Wero is based on instant account-to-account payments and will eliminate intermediaries in the payment chain and associated costs.
The STET-CORE system is a French interbank automated clearing house that has been designated as a Systemically Important Payment System at the European level. STET, the name of the operating company, refers to Systèmes Technologiques d'Echange et de Traitement, and CORE, the name of the infrastructure itself, refers to COmpensation REtail.
