The High Security Printing (HSP) EMEA Awards continue to serve as the region’s leading platform for recognising excellence in design and innovation for banknotes and IDs. This year’s HSP EMEA awards were held on 10 February in Rabat, Morocco (see also page 8). In this edition, we are covering the ID awards, followed by the best innovation in banknotes in the next edition.
The ID’s sector winners collectively reflect a broader transition towards ‘polycarbonate fortresses’, where nature-inspired design and layered optical technologies create multi-level verification systems that move protection from surface printing to embedded and subsurface security architectures. Here is a glimpse of the winners:
The Best New National ID Card award was presented to the Estonian Police and Border Guard Board for its new-generation national ID card, issued from November 2025. The card combines an upgraded physical platform with Estonia’s mature digital identity ecosystem, supporting the country’s ‘eEstonia’ framework.
Nature-inspired design, along with optical features, plays a central role in the card’s security architecture. A diffractive surface pattern evokes shimmering water, while a new-generation DOVID depicts a boulder emerging from water, referencing Estonia’s glacial landscape. The national bird, the barn swallow, appears through tactile and optically variable features that support intuitive first-line inspection.
As a world first, the card incorporates Thales Gemalto RevealPlus, combining a window with a secondary portrait, decoder lens and hidden portrait data; tilting reveals animated rolling text and angle-dependent information. Thales Gemalto True Vision adds a UV control, revealing a natural-colour cornflower on the reverse. The translucent polycarbonate body shows the embedded contactless antenna, and an advanced chip supports both contact and contactless digital services.
The Principality of Liechtenstein received the Best New Passport award for its redesigned passport family launched in February 2026. The series harmonises regular, diplomatic and service passports on a unified technical and visual platform.
A polycarbonate datapage with a full-colour personalised portrait significantly increases resistance to forgery and substitution. The portrait is duplicated on the first paper page, providing a robust secondary verification point using a different personalisation technology and substrate.
Security printing is comprehensively upgraded across the booklet. Each visa page features individual artwork with fine-line guilloches and security line structures themed around Liechtenstein’s 11 municipalities. Under UV, a multicolour fluorescent image of Vaduz Castle appears on the datapage, complemented by UV contour lines and street layouts inside the booklet for meaningful, inspection-friendly complexity.
Biometric enrolment is now fully live-capture, enabling immediate issuance following application.
The Government of Georgia received the Best New Document Series award for its harmonised family of ePassports and eID cards developed with Veridos and the Public Service Development Agency. The programme aligns six passport types and four identity card types across materials, features, and visuals.
The concept, ‘A Journey Through History, Secured by Design’, embeds geography, culture and heritage into the security architecture. In the ePassport, each double-page spread presents a Georgian region using objects, landscapes and symbols anchored by cartographic fine-line artwork. Under UV, a second narrative emerges as flora, fauna and artefacts fluoresce, with continuous daylight-to-UV transitions supporting intuitive inspection while increasing simulation difficulty.
The custom substrate includes a primary watermark of the Georgian coat of arms, a security thread with the national flag and inscriptions, and highlight page-number watermarks. Multi-colour intaglio, OVI and embossing provide strong first-line controls.
The polycarbonate datapage adds a transparent window, holographic elements, micro-lettering and rainbow printing, plus a transparent stripe revealing the antenna with a dedicated UV brilliance inlay check.
The Netherlands Vehicle Authority (RDW) was awarded Best New Travel Document for its new model Dutch driving licence, which went into production from June 2025, updating the card’s visual design, strengthening its authentication features, and retaining the ID-1 format.
Described in public communications as a ‘hidden masterpiece’, the licence is designed to support simple first-line checks – look, tilt, feel and UV – while raising the barrier for counterfeiters.
RDW notes that ‘not everything is visible to the naked eye’ and highlights that UV inspection reveals concealed illustrations, including motifs such as a road network and traffic lights, enabling rapid verification.
The 2025 model is built around a multi-technology security architecture with 11 authentication features, including a Sealys® clear window combined with multiple laser image (MLI) effects; a positive/negative image element; a diffractive optically variable image device (DOVID) overlay; and a secured background design.
The licence continues to include a contactless chip supporting online authentication. The production contract for the new model was awarded to Thales, which also produces the Dutch vehicle registration certificate.
The Best New House Passport award, a new category, recognised ANY Security Printing Company for its Collaborative Sample Passport, a marketing ePassport produced with SICPA, IQ Structures, BP Security, Hueck Folien, ANY SecLab and other partners.
Conceived as ‘a journey through security, art and collaboration’, the booklet demonstrates how an integrated security architecture can be built around a coherent design.
An ICAO-compliant polycarbonate datapage integrates SICPA SPARK® optical effects, colour-shift features and DualGlow™ clear-window fluorescence. Protection is enhanced by IQ Structures’ nanoDOVID® full-surface construction, complemented by laser perforation, serial numbering, AURORA secure QR verification, and augmented-reality markers that demonstrate physical– digital convergence.
The booklet combines a patent-protected full-colour cover with customised UV graphics and bespoke security paper, integrating a multitone watermark, an embedded security thread, and UV bi-fluorescent additives. Inner covers and visa pages use intaglio, offset and screen printing with IR-transparent/IR-absorbing inks, negative microtext, latent images, UV rainbow printing and up-converting luminescent inks. Penta-fluorescent offset inks deliver five optical responses across UV/IR bands for machine-assisted checks.
In the second new ID category, the Best New Technology award was presented to TOPPAN Security for CHROMA, a colour laser engraving personalisation solution enabling secure, full-colour portraits on polycarbonate passport datapages and ID cards.
CHROMA is a pure colour laser process that forms lifelike, high-definition images inside the polycarbonate structure, producing sharp, photo-realistic portraits with accurate skin tones and smooth tonal gradients without surface printing or added inks.
A single laser source addresses three colour channels – cyan, magenta and yellow – within a CHROMA-reactive polycarbonate layer integrated during lamination. Using a subtractive colour model and finely tuned laser parameters, the system can reproduce up to 16.7 million colours.
As the portrait is fully embedded below the surface, it removes consumables and avoids vulnerabilities associated with overlays or surface-printed colour images. The subsurface image is highly resistant to abrasion, tampering and environmental stress; attempts to peel or replace it irreversibly damage the polycarbonate body. A characteristic micro-line structure visible under 15× magnification adds a forensic control.
The technology complies with ICAO portrait standards while maintaining standard polycarbonate document thickness.
https://reconnaissance.net/design-and-innovation-in-banknotes-and-id-recognised-at-HSP EMEA-2026/
