Scope
Thin flexible cards, the subject of this International Standard, are used to automate the controls for access to goods or services such as mass transit, highway toll systems, car parks, vouchers, stored value, etc.
For these applications, data can be written and/or read by machines using various recording techniques such as magnetic stripe, optical character recognition (OCR), bar code, etc.
This part of ISO/IEC 15457 specifies the magnetic stripe and encoding characteristics of thin flexible cards at two points in the card life cycle:
1) at the point of loading into the card issuing equipment;
2) at the point of issue to the public.
Guidance concerning the storage and usage of finished cards (including magnetic stripe cards) under various environmental conditions is given in ISO/IEC 15457-1.
