Bull Italia SpA, the Italian subsidiary of Groupe Bull SA, Paris, benefits from a recent change in Italian law under which the City of Bergamo in northern Italy is to introduce self-service dispen sers of a range of official government certificates. Bull Italia is providing 10 Certinform machines. The head of the 50,000 families resident in the city of Bergamo will soon receive a CP8, Model TB100 Smart Card for use in the machines. Without the new law, which bestows legal validity on electronically reproduced official signatures for certain documents, Bergamo would have been unable to set up the system, says Fiorenzo Zerbetto, Bull Italia spokesman in Milan. The self-service machines will pro vide eight types of demographic documents, such as birth certifi cates and certificates of citizenship, which Italians need to apply for passports and enroll in school, among other things. The certificates are provided either on plain paper or affixed with an official government stamp, which gives them legal validity. The cards have 24K-bits of rewritable memory, which the Certinform machines will update every time a government office registers a change in the central database. With the freedom the system provides in the circulation of government documents, Bull Italia was required to guarantee a high level of security, Zerbetto says. The microprocessor-based cards were chosen over their magnetic cousins, for instance, because they are much more difficult to falsify, he says. Even the plain paper bears a woven-in government seal and cannot be easily rep roduced. An agreement between the regional banking group, Con sorzio Interbancaria Lombardo per la Moneta Elettronica, CILME, and the City of Bergamo set up CILME to manage the cards and allowed the cards to replace existing CP8 bank cards, called Oscar. As a result, citizens can pay for the government docu ments either with cash or by using the card to debit their bank account directly. In the future the cards will have multiple uses, including electronic banking and point-of-sale activity in restaurants, supermarkets and petrol stations. Next spring, says Zerbetto, Bergamo intends to add other services to the card, such as access to limited parking in the city’s historic district and access to some public transport. Longer term plans, he says, include putting medical information onto the card for citizens with chronic illnesses. The new system could blunt criticism of the government from some information technology consultants, who say the government spends a lot on information technology, but has not found innovative ways to use it. Roberto Bruni, advisor to the mayor on demographics and citizen relations, is more specific. The advantages this brings to the citizen are measured in terms of the minimal upheaval in services, the con sequent reduction in traffic and discomfort for the elderly, the elimination of waiting times at counters, the possibility to ac cess services 24 hours a day and more convenient modes of payment. Together these factors contribute directly to a better quality of life. A similar, multi-purpose card project is in its initial phase at the Universita La Sapienza in Rome where 80,000 students and university employees are using the Smart Cards for identification as well as to use and pay for university services. Over the next three years, says Zerbetto, Bull Italia is expecting that the university will put about 30,000 cards into use. – Marsha Johnston.
