L-1, welcome!

By: Ray Pellecchia

File Under: NYSE

• 0 Comments
• Email Entry

Here's news to warm the heart of a Big Board blogger: two Nasdaq companies merge and create L-1 Identity Solutions, which will list on the NYSE today. Nice ticker symbol: ID.

Check out our ad in on the home page of nyse.com and in today's Financial Times. And here's the link to our video interview with Robert V. LaPenta, L-1's CEO, chairman and president. Excerpt:

What are the federal and international mandates and initiatives that drive L-1 business?

Post 9/11 there was a lot of promise. There were a lot of federal programs that were mandated. The products weren’t ready and politically I think the country wasn’t ready to start implementing a lot of these solutions. That now is beginning to unfold. And we’re seeing initiatives like HSPD Club, which is the Presidential directive where all government employees now have to have biometrically-enabled credentials. We’re seeing the US Visit Program, where anybody that enters or leaves the country needs an E-Passport. We’re seeing the initiative for Real ID, where when you go get your driver’s license no longer will you be able to just present your old driver’s license. You’ll have to have a birth certificate and a photo ID, which will now be incorporated into your driver’s license. So these are programs that are moving forward around the world. They’re international programs which are very large. There’s a program called TWIP, which is the Transportation Worker Identification Program. It recently came to the forefront because of the controversy involving the ports, where Dubai was gonna take over management of the US ports. That initiative now is gonna involve credentialing all of the port workers and all of the merchant marines that come into the ports and the truck drivers that go in and out of the ports. That could be a multi-billion dollar program when it’s all over. L-1 is uniquely situated—positioned--to be able to participate in every level of those large programs.