The U.S. General Services Administration has awarded Entrust Inc. a four-year, $4.5 million contract to continue providing hosted PKI services and digital certificates as the security infrastructure for HSPD-12 initiatives. An incumbent in the re-compete proposal, Entrust has provided managed PKI solutions and services for the GSA’s credentialing program since 2007.

Entrust Inc. has made enhancements to its Entrust Discovery digital certificate product by expanding search capabilities for digital certificates residing within Microsoft’s Cryptographic APIs and adding more than 25 basic or custom policy field alerts to ease certificate management.

Gemalto has announced that it will provide its Optelio contactless stickers to UniCredit Slovakia for the country’s first commercial mobile payment deployment.

The technology will enable UniCredit Slovakia customers to turn their regular handsets into contactless payment devices by simply attaching the Optello sticker. Users can make contactless tap and go payments of up to €20 at over 3,000 MasterCard acceptance points across Slovakia, including fast food restaurants, cinemas, supermarkets and other retail outlets.

SCHUFA, a German credit reporting agency, has issued more than 1 million grid cards from Entrust for multi-factor authentication to its consumer portal. SCHUFA and its customers rely on the Entrust IdentityGuard authentication platform and Entrust’s grid cards.