Table of Contents
Competition
The market for products and services in the payment card industry is highly competitive.
Competitive factors for our business include product quality, customer service, innovation, product line
comprehensiveness and integration, timely introduction of new products, features and capabilities, and
price. Although our company is smaller in size than the corporations that own some of our key competitors,
we believe that our size and payment card related focus allow us to be more flexible and responsive to our
customers’ needs.
We believe we are in competition with other card producers, card personalization service
providers, card packaging providers, and others that provide technology and digital solutions related to
payment cards, such as ABCorp, Arroweye, CompoSecure L.L.C., Entrust, FIS, Fiserv, Giesecke &
Devrient GmbH, HID Global, IDEMIA, Perfect Plastic Printing, Thales, Travel Tags, and WestRock (Multi
Packaging Solutions), among others.
Certain of these competitors are global conglomerates that possess substantially greater financial,
sales and marketing resources than we do and can offer additional integrated products and solutions.
In addition, certain existing and potential customers have the ability to produce and/or personalize
debit and credit payment cards in-house. Accordingly, we compete with certain of our customers, including
those that offer transaction processing products and services to financial institutions.
Suppliers
Our general procurement philosophy is to prevent or avoid being dependent on a single-source
supplier. We believe we have developed constructive relationships with our suppliers and, in general,
receive a high level of cooperation and support from them. However, certain components are only available
from a single supplier, or substituting a component from a different supplier may require additional time
and investment. Some of the most important components of our products include the microchips and
antennas for our card products. Our main suppliers of microchips and antennas include three leading
international producers with locations in Germany, Thailand, and Singapore, some of which source
materials from Taiwan. For the year ended December 31, 2024, approximately 95% of our purchased
microchips and antennas came from these three main suppliers, and approximately 78% came from one
supplier, including most of our contactless chips. The other key components for our products are substrates
and inlays. Our Second Wave payment cards feature a core made with ROBP, which we either have sourced
or currently source from suppliers in Haiti and Thailand.
We monitor supply-chain risks and evaluate alternative suppliers based on numerous attributes
including quality, performance, service, scalability, features, innovation, resiliency and price. In 2022 in
order to fulfill the demands of our customers and to mitigate the impact of supply chain shortages, we
entered into a capacity reservation agreement with one of our chip suppliers to reserve production supply
capacity. Under the agreement, we agreed to pay certain fees in exchange for the supplier’s commitment to
reserve capacity to produce a set quantity of chips from 2023 through 2026, subject to certain conditions,
and we have committed to purchase those chips. The total value of our commitment is approximately
$190.0 million over the term of the agreement. As of December 31, 2024, the remaining commitment was
$62.0 million.
Intellectual Property
We own, control or license various intellectual property rights, such as patents, trade secrets,
confidential information, trademarks, service marks, tradenames, copyrights and applications. We are party
to certain patent cross-license arrangements with industry participants and may, from time to time, enter
into similar commercial agreements we consider necessary or beneficial for our business.