Five countries in West Africa select SPS solutions for their national eID cards

Smart Packaging Solutions (SPS), provider of reliable and sustainable ID card and ePassport manufacturing technologies, announced its solutions have been selected by five countries in West Africa for their national eID cards as part of the ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) document standardization project.
SPS technology selection for these five countries demonstrates the company’s products are fully compliant not only with the ECOWAS international standard, but also able to fulfil specific demands from each government.
The international ECOWAS biometric ID card project standardizes a new generation of eID documents to facilitate the movements of the 350 million citizens of the 15 countries constituting the ECOWAS zone. The ECOWAS biometric ID card aims at providing the maximum protection against fraud and identity theft while offering interoperability with the existing national systems.
The ECOWAS specification includes provisions for the card, data, format, colour and manufacturing requirements. Among these characteristics is the ability to have a means of level 2 card authentication thanks to an “aluminium watermark” visible by transparency. SPS Customized Antenna Image, or CAI, perfectly answers this demand. With SPS unique manufacturing process, based on EBoostID, the antenna is designed on request, which allows including aluminium etched distinctive signs in it. Typically, an antenna distinctive sign can be a national symbol, an acronym, or a second embodiment of the national symbol already part of the marked module or the card surface. This level 2 security feature is highly appreciated by law enforcement officers to perform night control. It can be easily and instantly checked with a smartphone torch by any policeman in the field to make a quick and fast opinion on the identity card authenticity.
Complying with ECOWAS and national governments’ demands SPS technology also includes its Customized Module Image (CMI), that consists in having a specific image engraved on the micromodule for each member state. This image typically represents the symbol of the ECOWAS region or for each state its coat of arms or another design decided by the government. This level 1 feature has been widely deployed for more than 10 years on various ID documents across Europe, Africa, America and Asia.
Working in cooperation with card manufacturers familiar with secure document printing, SPS provides them with full polycarbonate (PC) card inlay subsets allowing them to have an integrated and efficient manufacturing process while delivering the highest quality cards to the governments. SPS delivers its subsets in two forms, S-Lam is where the antenna is totally laminated in polycarbonate and S-Fix is where it is prefixed within the PC layer structure. To satisfy all manufacturers technical needs, SPS micromodules can be delivered in standard thickness or thin version on request to accommodate various card structures.
Dominique Charrie, ID Product Manager at SPS declared, “We are very proud to be the first supplier for ID card modules and antennas for the eID cards of five countries among ECOWAS members. This demonstrates how our technology totally fulfils government requirements and is acknowledged by card manufacturers as the most cost-efficient and giving the best results.”
ECOWAS countries include Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.
IN Groupe and SPS will be exhibiting on booth RIV F 020 at Trustech, a major event for digital trust technologies taking place in Cannes, France, on November 27-29, 2018.
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