NFC Technology Helping to Fuel ELATEC Americas’ Market Expansion

An Interview with ELATEC Americas’ New CEO Paul Massey

NFC Forum Member ELATEC is amid a major expansion in the Americas and recently appointed Paul Massey as its new CEO for ELATEC Americas to provide strategic leadership and drive market growth.  ELATEC is a global leader in wireless user authentication, authorization, and access control technology.  Its remotely updateable, universal RFID/NFC/BLE readers help OEMs, Integrators and VARs provide secure, “future proof” user authentication for access control for their customers.

We caught up with Paul recently as he was settling into his new position based in sunny Palm City, Florida and had the chance to ask him a few questions about his new role, NFC readers and the NFC Forum.

• First, congratulations on being appointed ELATEC Americas CEO. What will you be doing in your new role?

ELATEC is in a period of major expansion in the Americas and we need independent regional leadership to successfully implement our strategy and take advantage of the market opportunities ahead. My focus is to lead that effort. We are fortunate to be part of a global organization that delivers high-quality products and technology solutions to solve real challenges—secure, convenient and easy to implement user authentication, authorization and access control for buildings, devices and the assets they protect.  NFC is an important technology for our product line.

• NFC technology is important to your company’s success. What value does NFC bring to ELATEC? To customers?

There are numerous applications using NFC for which our reader technology would be well-suited.  ELATEC readers support writing and reading of NFC tags so, for example, our customers could use these in different projects, including card coding projects with card printers, writing specific information on the card, e.g. VCARD which allows easy sharing of the contact details, employee data for authentication, etc. It can also be used in the product life cycle, product tracking in industry and other such applications.

Our readers also support other active devices such as smartphones with NFC HCE (Host Card Emulation) and allow usage of these devices for user authentication and authorization in access control applications such as physical building access, secure printing, time and attendance, fleet management and many others. NFC can also be used for Bluetooth paring handover. We have customers using it this way in a number of industries such as with medical and fitness equipment. We also support NFC peer-to-peer, allowing the exchange of the NFC messages between NFC-enabled devices and our reader.

• How do you plan to get more involved in the NFC Forum?

As CEO I hope to have ELATEC become more active in the NFC Forum in 2020.  There appears to be a number of opportunities for us to get involved. NFC is an important part of our business, so it is valuable for us to stay current on NFC technology as well as have the opportunity to network with other companies.