CSA Preface Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the Canadian Advisory Committee (CAC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T). Scope Thin flexible cards (TFCs) are used to automate the controls for access to goods or services such as mass transit, highway toll systems, car parks, vouchers and stored value. For these applications, data can be written and/or read by machines using various recording techniques: 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\'s life cycle: . at the point of loading into the card-issuing equipment; . 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.