Chams  Plc is set to boost electronic commerce in the country with the deployment of a combined total of 50,000 Point of Sales terminals and 1000 ATMs, Group Managing Director of the company, Mr. Demola Aladekomo, has disclosed.

Aladekomo who made this disclosure at the inauguration of the new company in the group, ChamsSwitch in Abuja on Thursday, said the PoS terminals and ATMs would be put into use in different parts of the country as from January 2009.

According to him, the terminals and ATMs are highly secured card payment systems built with biometric features which as well incorporate the traditional PIN security systems.

Speaking at the ceremony, Chairman of ChamsSwitch and former Governor, Central Bank of Nigeria, Mr. Joseph Sanusi, said the firm was a child of necessity born out of the need to provide services seen to be lacking among the present players in the industry.

According to him, ChamsSwitch’s visionis to be a world class company that provides the most convenient way to pay for anything to any entity.

Sanusi said, “We are not only changing the face of the industry, our solutions and services cut across all sectors of the economy. We have built an enabling infrastructure to support our key public sector projects. Notable among these public sector projects is the concession awarded the Chams Consortium by the Federal Government of Nigeria to issue the new national Identity cards.

“These chip based ID cards with full proof biometric data capture, will have payment capabilities that will ride on the trusted ChamsSwitch backbone. Tens of millions of these payment-enabled ID cards will be issued in the coming months which will open a world of business opportunities for banks, government agencies, merchants as well as small and medium scale businesses.”

He added that Chams had continued in its culture of innovation to deploy the most modern and resilient platform in the industry.

ChamsSwitch, according to him, runs on an integrated payment engine designed to acquire, authenticate, route, switch, and authorise financial transactions across multiple channels.

“This product which represents the next-generation of world-class payments platform is designed by ACI, a worldwide leader in transaction switching solutions, drawing on nearly 30 years experience in payments software manufacture. ACI’s solutions are currently being used by most leading banks worldwide and by VISA and MasterCard,” he said.

He added that the system boasts of advanced safety features supporting chip and PIN as well as magnetic stripe card transactions and is compatible with other solutions deployed by banks and other switches in Nigeria. (By Everest Amaefule , Punch )