Consortium Council Leadership
The MULTOS Consortium is led by a chair and co-vice chairs who guide the strategic direction, development, promotion, and adoption of the MULTOS technology platform. The leadership team encourages collaboration, defines technical roadmaps, ensures alignment with industry standards, and supports the global growth of MULTOS as a secure and scalable platform for smart cards and connected devices.
John has been intimately involved with chip cards from shortly after Roland Moreno proposed them to the industry as it is now. He participated at the ISO group that laid the standards for chip cards. Before they were mass produced, John as the principal technologist at INTAMIC wrote white papers for the banking industry on potential uses for chip cards, personalisation processes and so on.
He wrote the initial EMV security architecture now approaching 30 years of use, He co-invented the security principles that underlay MULTOS with the vision of a multi-application chip card where trust was based on independent security evaluations and nothing else.
John was the Mondex purse security manager as well as the first MULTOS security manager. Latterly John has been responsible for EMV security at Mastercard.
Bastian Knoppers has been a payments industry leader for over 45 years. In 1979 he founded CardPro Services and served as its’ CEO until 1999 when Metavante Corporation acquired CardPro Services. With the subsequent acquisition of Metavante by FIS, he continued to lead the CardPro business unit as Group Executive until 2021. Today he serves in Business Development, leading in key product development, M&A and enterprise Sales opportunities.
As a top three U.S. EMV chip card personalisation provider, FIS/CardPro issues over 130M cards/year and employs approximately 550 dedicated to serving over 3,000 clients and 20,000 card programs. FIS is the world’s largest MULTOS issuer.
Bastian has a Business degree from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He currently serves as Board of Governors for Providence Life Services and as Board Member for Timothy Christian Schools Foundation. Bastian was previously former Board President of Calvin University and Timothy Christian Schools, in addition to several other civic/charitable organisations.
Richard Cusson is a member of the MULTOS Consortium, representing Multos International. Richard’s involvement with smartcards dates to 1987 when he joined Groupe Bull, the French smart card pioneer. He held leadership positions in Canada, Paris and Southeast Asia. By 2019, he had joined the Australian payment specialist Keycorp, to manage their then nascent smart card division. Keycorp is one of the founding members of the MULTOS Consortium.
In September 2008 Gemalto (now Thales), the world leader in digital security, purchased Keycorp’s smart card division and became “Multos International”, the leading EMV technology supplier to card manufacturers. After a few years in China (2011-2013), Richard relocated to Canada from where he manages Multos International and its associated companies.
Richard is a graduate from l’École des Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC), Montréal.