By Jochen Scheil, Köra-Packmat Maschinenbau GmbH

In today's worldwide card industry with its huge variety of cards such as phone cards, internet cards, loyalty cards, SIM cards and credit cards, it is very important to take a closer look at the security features outside the card, such as the packaging. A lot has been discussed in recent years about this issue, but the main activities of almost every global player in the card market focused on card security features, creating a high security level on the primary product - "the card" - and not on the carrier, or "the packaging."

The question of why cards are packed today is quite simple to answer. One of the main purposes of packaging is to protect the primary product against environmental influences such as dust. Further, more and more security reasons lead companies to add value on the packaging material itself. Packages are excellently suited as an information carrier for marketing and sales purposes. Advertisements as well as operating instructions can be found on the card package. Mostly pre-printed films are used or the information is printed directly onto the package before the product is wrapped.

In summary, the general principle of packaging is:

• Sufficient protection of goods by use of moderate and optimized (area/volume) use of packaging material.
  Card wrapping requirements of today are different from those defined many years ago. Environmental aspects and material costs play an important part in choosing the right packaging material, and the following three requirements are essential:
  

1 Economic (cost saving, easy to handle)
2 Attractive (competitive appearance)
3 Tamper proof (security feature)

Many customers do not care about the card packaging when buying a pre-paid phone card e.g. during their holiday in a foreign country. But what is considered as an economic and tamper proof package? What do you think about when buying? Are you sure that the product inside has not been used before?

First let's have a look at the types of card packaging used today. It is very common to use no package at all. For special non-secure applications like loyalty cards, bonus cards, etc. this "wrapping type" (which is actually not a packaging) is widely used. The major types of card wrapping are the film based packages, mostly pre-formed polypropylene (PP films). They can roughly be subdivided into packages created with a thermal process and packages created with non-thermal processes… a minor rule in card wrapping play paper packages (card glued on a paper carrier) and so-called multi-packs such as cards packed manually into cost intensive boxes e.g. customized jewel cases.

Cards can be wrapped manually, by semi-automatic and automatic card wrapping machines. Throughput (wrapping speed) varies from 20-50 cycles/min (low speed), to 50-120 cycles/min (medium speed) and up to 500-600 cycles/min (high speed). Market prices of card wrapping machines starting from approximately 10.000 EUR for a "cheap" Flow-Pack (Finn seal / cookie wrap) machine and can easily reach 0.5 Mio EUR for a fully automated card wrapping line with the highest output and the latest sealing technology available on the market. Automatic card wrapping lines are used world wide by small and medium card manufacturers, as well as by the big global players.

To be competitive on the "everybody, everywhere" card market, companies need to focus in reducing labor costs and increasing productivity. Manual packaging is still done in less labor intensive countries by using PP bags, which are sealed simply with a "hot wire" after the product has been inserted manually. But even in those countries, mostly cheap local semi-automatic card wrapping machines, which are originally not made for card wrapping, are used for this purpose with a result that cannot compete with the latest technology used by the global players.

The dominating high tech technologies used by the leading manufacturers of card wrapping machines are as follows:

a) Thermal sealing processes (heated knife, linear and/or rotating, temporarily or permanently heated)

b)Ultrasonic sealing processes (rotating sealing drums/wheels, 2-side and 4-side sealing)

Why is it so important to choose the right technology when thinking about economic and tamper proof packaging of cards? Because the different technologies require different film materials at different costs. For example, a thermal sealing process at a very high throughput (> 180 cycles/min.) requires a special film material other than conventional PP film. Otherwise the seam can be opened very easily, as the inner layers of the film do not melt together. The result when a special film material is required is an increase in packaging costs due to the use of a more costly film and thus an increase on the cost per card.

But there is a process available in card wrapping machinery called "4-side ultrasonic sealing," which is an ideal solution for a tamper proof package. It is the use of the 4-side ultrasonic sealing process, where a unique security sealing seam on all 4 sides is applied around the card, which has been wrapped in conventional PP film material before. This sealing seam is embossed on all 4 sides at high speed (> 500 cycles/min.) and can be designed either as neutral or customized (e.g. with the logo of the provider), thus the requirement "security" is fulfilled. There is no need to use a special, laminated film material which is often required when using thermal sealing technology on wrapping machines at high speeds.

The 4-side ultrasonic sealing process is currently the only process where a high throughput can be obtained without loss in wrapping quality at a maximum security level. If we look back on the card wrapping requirements (economic, attractive, tamper proof) mentioned before, the security aspect becomes very important, as counterfeit products cause big losses to the card industry. The main reason to create a secure and tamper proof package is to protect the value inside the package, e.g. pre-paid phone card.

In order to avoid card fraud, different security levels in card packaging are used: