Jemmic is a Luxembourg company established in 2009 that helps companies digitalise their business. As a FinTech expert, Jemmic serves over thirty banks with over one million online users – be it with custom software in the form of web and mobile solutions or complete customer portals.
U-Safe is a strong authentication and transaction verification platform which allows users to authenticate securely in applications, either from KYC (Know Your Customer) processes or from self-registered leads. Thanks to the new partnership between Jemmic and Trust1Connector® announced in December 2017, U-Safe users can now experience PKI public key infrastructure (PKI)-based tokens in a user-friendly and seamless way.
Most people in the last few years have had to suffer through a complicated or impractical log on solution. With U-Safe, Jemmic provides the cornerstone for building an agile customer portal: U-Safe provides identity and access management and enables the seamless integration of a heterogeneous application landscape into a homogeneous customer experience. U-Safe is fully customisable and extensible to meet specific requirements, it offers exchanges with peers within a community, has self-service features for users and it is customisable to a company’s security policy.
A new simple and transparent solution
By partnering with Trust1Connector®, U-Safe can offer the end user a smartcard-based authentication and transaction signature with a very light-weight middleware that is compatible with most official electronic IDs issued across the EU. Jean-Pierre Schmit, Founder and CEO of Jemmic, who has been developing security and process improvement solutions, mainly in the financial field, since 2009, says that fewer steps, more transparency and simplicity is key.
“Basically, if a business or individual wants to sign a contract and they have U-Safe technology the PKI smart cards make everything simpler and more straightforward. No one wants to go through a long series of steps and companies trying to digitalise do not want to deal with supporting middleware on their customers’ devices – it should just work.”
Jemmic creates or enhances digitalised channels where they have not existed before in a company, mostly in corporate and investment banking, but the solution has to be uncomplicated for the business and the end user.
How the PKI smart card technology works
With Jemmic’s solution you do not have to download a huge piece of software to use PKI smart cards, hence transforming the PKI experience into a convenient plug and play one. If a company is going to digitalise it has to make things as easy as possible for its clients.
With the Trust1Connector®, U-Safe users can access state-of-the-art, compliant and secure methods of strong authentication. This technology removes all the complexity from digital communication processes, such as authentication and digital signature of documents or transactions, adding new secure ways of authentication to this already robust platform.
More value for the user
Jean-Pierre Schmit continues, “The main goal with this partnership is to afford U-Safe users new strong authentication methods with a user-friendly and frictionless platform. With the Trust1Connector®, our users can be abstracted from the PKI technology itself, allowing them to quickly and securely use their own identity and personal means of identification (citizen card, bank card, transport card, to name but a few). This means U-Safe can offer customers fully interoperable and compliant authentication methods within the European Union.”
“We see enormous opportunities ahead for our solution because sooner or later every European country will issue an EID (electronic identification) so as to access public and private online services in their country and eventually cross-border as well. However, the mutual and obligatory Europe-wide recognition of EID will accentuate or even make existing technology homogeneity issues worse. Luckily, with our solution that problem is solved. In fact, such issues are currently plaguing not only the Luxembourg EID (Luxembourgish Identity Cards) but also LuxTrust and Smart Cards.”
A successful partnership
The collaboration between Jemmic and the Trust1Connector® Team was facilitated by their membership in the Luxembourg ICT Cluster, which is managed by Luxinnovation. The cluster stimulates partnerships and cooperation between members in order to strengthen the competitiveness of the ICT sector in Luxembourg.
“Luxinnovation played a big part in bringing the right person to the table,” says Jean-Pierre Schmit. “Although it is true that we identified a first potential customer, it was Luxinnovation who did the job of bringing us all together.”
Compatibility with other systems and applications
Jean-Pierre Schmit points out that another value proposition of U-Safe is to integrate a heterogeneous application landscape into a single homogeneous customer portal. This enables banks and insurers to dynamically develop, buy or integrate new applications without compromising usability: the user logs on one single time and can then access all applications he is authorized to.
“We have the technology to allow these customer portals to be built in a very agile manner, with a first iteration being live in 3 – 6 months – a short time-to-market is a major key success factor” he confirms.
Indeed, at the Luxembourg Internet Days 2017, one topic of discussion was how building new customer portals can be very costly and complicated to put in place. With Jemmic’s approach, new applications as well as legacy systems can be integrated together in a customer portal, and this in an agile way and at a fraction of the cost of building a traditional customer portal. Jean-Pierre Schmit claims that “Banks want a solution for their customers which is both better and quicker rather than invest in some completely new solution that takes years to be live. They want to rid themselves of some legacy issues and make their customers happy. Jemmic solutions can solve these problems for banks.”