X-INFOTECH, a company with Global Head Quarters in Latvia and Africa business headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya is hosting a two day ‘Cards and Mobile Africa 2014’ conference which begun today and will end tomorrow.

The conference highlight the importance of African banks to change their debits cards from the traditional magnetic strip to the chip.

This, Vadims Teresko, the Co-Founder of X-Infotech said that the migration should be done by the end of this years as it is the most secure way of making paper transactions.

This is the first time the conference has been held in Africa, and according to Wanjiku Mwangi, MasterCard’s Director, Acceptance Development East Africa, Kenya is in its inception stage in administering this cards yet it is way ahead not only in East Africa but also ahead of Nigeria, Peru and Egypt.

The Principle Secretary, Ministry of ICT, Joseph Tiampati who was in the conference, welcomed the conference saying that it was in line with the country’s mission of migrating from digital to analogue. As a first step, he added, the government is switching the manual payment of taxes and making it online; he said with the inclusion of the magnetic chip it will help in reducing fraudulent activities from taking place.

The government official added that the banking sector have met to upgrade the ATM’s as well as the cards into functioning under the chip.

The conference will end tomorrow and will be covering Secure Identification Africa 2014 and will present cutting-edge developments and proven solutions surrounding the security document industry, and their successful usage in many projects and countries.  

This Event has brought together industry professionals and experts from around the world who areengaged in ID document security, Identification data security, Document verification, Biometric solutions on Governmental and Nation-wide level.