New e-passports for secure traveling and identification

ILLIES & Co. providing new passport lines to Asiafor the production of state-of-the-art e-passports

Machine readable passports were introduced already in the 1980’ies. After the terror attacks in New York City in 2001, the development of forgery-proof ID-documents was accelerated to the next level by widely introducing the biometric passport (also known as e-passport,  ePassport, or digitized passport).

Actually, Malaysia started issuing the first biometric passports already in 1998, and in 2008 over 60 countries used this technology and their number increased to over 150 countries by mid-2019.

The primary reasons for worldwide growth in the use of ePassportsare:

• More secure Identification of the passport holder
• Lower chances of forgery of biometric information stored in the passport
• Enhanced privacy protection
• Greater protection against identity theft
• Ease of handling entry and exit at border controls with automated passport readers

Only a few companies worldwide are able to manufacture machines for the production of e-passports. Prominently, BW Papersystems under the brand name Kugler-Womako) took on the challenge and by continuously improving the technical quality of their machines retained their market leader position until today.

ILLIES as the longtime exclusive representative of BW Papersystems in Japan and Korea has a deep expertise in the market for mass-production of security documents.

Together with expert engineers of BW Papersystems, ILLIES specialists could successfully map out the best possible technical answers for the challenges our customers were faced with, based on the stringent technical demands of their governments.

These challenges include the thick PC holder page in which the chip with the biometric data is contained, a monitoring systems and a top-notch track & trace system to control and warrant a flawless data exchange with existing production management systems. Needed expertise and know-how was available at BW Papersystems and the customer demand could be successfully translated into a reliable technical solution. That was the base for several orders of complete e-passport lines that were installed recently.

Considering the additional burden of travel restrictions due to COVID-19 the installation and commissioning of the machines in 2020 made the successful start-up of production a special challenge. Our ILLIES team of engineers on site were perfectly supported by BW Papersystems engineers and jointly were able to bridge the gap and implement a smooth production ramp up. Our teams also guarantee customers a perfect after sales service concept for a stable production in years to come.

We are proud to be the chosen partners to the most demanding clients in the industry and are motivated to strive for 100% satisfaction.