CEO and founder Claude Niedermann was coming home from work one day and found himself in front of a locked house. He had forgotten his keys at the office.
Claude imagined how nice it would be if they were somehow attached to his body, so he would never forget them again.

As his speciality is nail cosmetics, he had an idea: What if they were attached to his finger nail, in the form of a micro chip?

Soon after, he founded Smart Chip Switzerland AG. 3 201 201 Claude couldn't get this idea out of his head. Over the next few years, whenever he found the time, he would work on it.

There were a lot of open questions, chief among them:
Would this even be doable from a technical standpoint? 6 Claude met with Infineon, Germany's largest semiconductor manufacturer, and Digiseq, a UK-based expert on wearable tech.

Together, they determined that while it was very hard, it was not impossible. That was all Claude needed and he patented the idea. 20
1 7 Fast forward five years.

As it turns out, making a chip small and durable enough to attach to a finger nail is not an easy task. The house keys took a backseat in this time. The first step was payment.

Thanks to the tireless work of Smart Chip Switzerland in cooperation with Infineon and Digiseq, a working prototype was ready for testing by early 2022. 20
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The prototype worked beautifully, but it did not yet meet the stringent security requirements of the payment industry. That's were Mastercard came in.

Over the next two years, multiple new prototypes were created. Each new version was even smaller than the previous one and had an improved range - by 2023, it was enough to satisfy the requirements of the payment industry. 20
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2024 was the year when the first Smart Chip was launched. We are very proud to present this innovation after many years of work. 20
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4 The Future

Payment and Business Cards are only the beginning. We are working to bring new features to the Smart Chip, such as digital keys, digital IDs, and much more. 20
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