As IQ Structures, a member of the IQS Group, expands its capacity to protect over 1 billion documents a year, it is looking at ways to simplify the job of the document inspector and frustrate the work of the counterfeiter.

In 2021, as Costa Rica reached the 200-year anniversary of independence from Spain and at a time when countries around the world were struggling with the effects of COVID, the country took the bold move to upgrade its travel document from machine-readable passport (MRP) to a fully compliant biometric passport, which was a joint winner of the 2023 Regional ID Document of the Year award at the HSP Latin America conference in the Bahamas.

In this, the first major redesign of the country’s travel document for over two decades, the Casa da Moeda do Brasil used holograms and optically variable inks (OVIs) to help secure the document – and a prestigious international award.