Business profile
Based in Hampshire and now in its 25th year,Euclid has come a long way from its roots as a solution provider into the international market for government ID, driving licence and passport programmes
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n those early days the company quickly built a reputation for developing custom solutions into a market which had non-standard production machinery requirements. However, with the passing of time, the advent of digital printing and ID card standards (ergo equipment needs) merging ever closer to financial cards, the requirement for custom solutions significantly decreased. At the same time (around 2003), Euclid’s directors realised that the emerging UK ID and smartcard market needed a high quality, outsourced, but UK-based bureau service. The firm took the production model developed and installed into many national ID and driving licence programmes and replicated it at its own premises. Since then, Euclid’s secure card bureau has produced more than four million smart/ ID cards per year across a range of schemes and government clients. Euclid managing director Geoff Neal explains: ‘At the heart of the solution is a digital card production system which outputs 10,000 cards per hour. Cards are printed 21 up on A3 sheets, comprising a five-layer construction which is heat and pressure treated to provide a rugged, homogenous plastic card with the print integral to the card itself - hence its
trademark Integra®.’ Neal says the key differentiator is that Integra® is not simply an over-printed plastic card blank, as with competitive products. ‘Integra’s construction provides a card which is inherently tamper evident, with print that will not fade in sunlight or wear away with handling.’ Neal regards these as the failings of the traditional desktop approach to card over-printing solutions.
Security integral to Euclid design The Integra® print engine features a six-colour process allowing for CMYK and two spot colours. Euclid even offer an invisible, ultra violet print working – visible under relevant lighting conditions ¬– which provides significant added print security. Because the printer outputs at a massive 2,500dpi resolution, compared to just 300dpi with over-printing solutions, added security features such as guilloche, fine line printing, pseudo rainbow and micro-text are also available.
Alongside high profile and successful UK government schemes – such as the Northern Ireland Electoral Card which achieved marked reductions in electoral fraud – Euclid’s ITSO (integrated transport smartcard organisation) travel passes have impacted significantly on
the transport card market since 2008. The English National Concessionary Transport Scheme (ENCTS), a smart bus pass system for elderly and disabled passengers marked Euclid’s move into commercial smart ticketing for other transport schemes. Neal explained: ‘Getting to grips with the ITSO specification was challenging but no more so than the many international standards involving smart or ID cards, including ISO and ICAO. However, where ITSO differs to these is that the card media has to be independently tested and certified. Its encoders (ITSO Perso Posts) and controlling servers (HOPS) are also subject to certification. We worked with our partner Unicard to deliver a complete ITSO-compliant service.’
ENCTS renewal cycle
ENCTS scheme passes – typically valid for five years – called for large volumes of renewals earlier this year and Euclid anticipated that it needed to produce and mail out a million cards over a five-week period.
Euclid’s £500k investment in Datacard’s high speed mailing solutions increased the yield of match mailing of cards to personalised letters. Euclid subsequently customised these to allow for both camera and OCR checking of the unique printed ITSO Shell Reference Number and reading of the ITSO component within the chip to ensure correct functionality of each card. Neal continued: ‘This left just one historically serious pinch point in production – that of encoding the ITSO product. Shelling and encoding the national products on a DESfire 4k card (the standard choice for ENCTS) typically takes 12 to 14 seconds per card. As a result the company produced an automated ITSO Parallel Processing Perso Post, which multiplied the nominal 250 cards per hour yield by six to around 1,600 cards per hour,’ added Neal.
The resultant system – E7020 – was certified by ITSO earlier this year (Certificate No. C00085-2) and immediately put into service. Further systems were constructed to ensure an encoding yield to match our factory requirement for a 30,000 card yield over a seven hour shift – or 100,000 cards per day.
‘That Euclid fulfilled the additional September 2013 Page 131
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