Time to Start Making Secure ID Cards?

By Bill Knotts, VP Sales and Marketing, Spartanics

While some ICMA members have jumped into new markets for secure ID cards and similar security feature-rich card products, others have held back. If your company hasn’t yet taken the leap, here are some factors to consider:

1. ID cards are a relatively fast growing segment of the card industry.

You might think of 9/11 as the equivalent of a tsunami-sized sea change in demand for secure card applications. To those of us supplying card manufacturing technology to worldwide card manufacturers, it’s clear that the appetite for more complex security features on ID cards, access control cards, and similar security feature-rich cards is a worldwide phenomenon. There is not only a clear demand for these type cards; there is no indication that this demand is near peaking.

2. Fierce competition in financial card markets is driving margins down.

In the last few years we’ve seen financial cards move closer to commodity purchase status. Competition is at an all time high—and here too, there is no sign of this trend changing any time soon.

3. Leveraging prior capital equipment expenditures makes good business sense.

Some of the companies moving into security card markets are security printers with expertise in paper-based products such as currencies. Any card manufacturer that has both the expertise and equipment for plastic card manufacturing can sidestep the learning curve that such security printing businesses must take on to be competitive in secure ID type plastic cards and similar security feature-rich plastic card products. For example, assuming your card punching equipment can deliver tolerances of +/- 0.1 mm in cut-to-print registration, and assuming your punching equipment has a modular design that enables you to easily reconfigure with steel rule dies or to add output modules that keep personalized cards in required order, you have what it takes to do secure ID card punching. Unfortunately, card manufacturers without such high precision or flexible designs in their card punching equipment may have more difficulties. Though it is a relatively minor expense, the automated counting equipment used by nearly every MasterCard/ Visa card manufacturer (and issuer) is entirely adequate for the audits required in similarly secure processes for controlled ID card products.

4. Quality control technology for security features is more doable today

The nightmare scenario for many card manufacturers has been the inefficiency and bottlenecks you can expect from lines of workers with black lights doing a one-by-one manual inspection of every card with an important UV feature. The demands for quality in security feature-rich products are often quite high, and the inconsistencies of manual inspection are problematic. True, ID cards and similar products go way beyond the UV images familiar to financial card manufacturers—bar codes, signature panels, fingerprint boxes, presence of portraits, security decals, IR bar codes and UV security features—these are likely complexities of ID card designs.

However, the same single-run automated inspection systems that were introduced to card manufacturers a few years ago can be adapted to meet these added requirements for inspection with relatively minor expense of time and money. In fact, there are many ways to reconfigure self-learning inspection systems to tackle various types of security feature inspections, such that your card manufacturing plant does not need to build in more inspection sophistication than your applications require.

If UV or IR inspection only needs to verify the presence of UV/IR inks, then one can very inexpensively adjust an inspection system to register the presence of inks in these spectra, without the cost of an additional camera. In fact, many financial card manufacturers already have such automated inspection capabilities to enable them to control costs of inspection simple UV images on credit cards. In practice, these card manufacturers couple the UV ink verification automation with random manual spot check to ensure that the printed image is the correct one, and use the automated inspection system simply to register the presence of ink in the correct spectra.

A second approach is to run cards through an automated inspection system twice—once in the visible spectrum and then re-run in the desired UV or IR spectra (or vice versa).

This approach will allow you to not only verify the presence of ink but to automate the inspection of the actual image. Like ink verification inspection, this does not require the expense for an additional camera. It does require the added expense of multiple inspection runs and the inevitable potential for defects that comes from the extra human handling during multiple run inspections.

When the integrity of UV or IR images is critical to the ID card product, the best suited inspection systems are ones that have two cameras at work simultaneously—one for the desired UV or IR spectra and one for the visible spectrum. These multi-camera inspection systems have the advantage of fully automating inspection in a single pass, and when you consider the throughput of 10 cards/second that you can expect from such systems, it becomes clear why they are such a good investment to make whenever quality is non-negotiable—in ID card, financial card, or whatever application.

5. Consultations on re-tooling for security feature-rich cards is widely accessible.

Reputable manufacturers of card manufacturing equipment—for automated counting, inspection, card punching, etc.—have been assisting companies like yours to transition into new markets, and usually do so without charge. Is it time to get into loyalty cards? ID cards? Gift cards? RFID cards? The answer usually depends not only on the perceived opportunities in new products, but in what it will take to get you there. You can save a lot of time and money by engaging your equipment suppliers in conversations about how to most cost-effectively retool for new markets. Use these resources, as your fellow ICMA members do.