A Confluence of Innovation, Design, Security and Technology at HSP Asia

The 2023 High-Security Printing™ (HSP) Asia conference took place in Colombo, Sri Lanka, from 4-6 December, following a four-year break due to the pandemic. This marked the conference's first appearance in Sri Lanka, featuring a well-organised programme and a diverse audience of specialists.

The conference hosted 230 delegates from 102 organisations across 37 countries. It spanned three days, including pre-conference workshops on identity and currency.

The identity workshop was hosted by ID technology company Onfido, which addressed the growing demand for self-service and online document authentication and the challenges global organisations face to stop targeted attacks in a document-not-present environment.

There were two currency workshops, the first hosted by counterfeit expert Kerre Corbin. She described how a father and son operation was sentenced in 2022 for manufacturing £977,000 worth of counterfeit Scottish banknotes. The notes were printed at a legitimate printing shop and then taken to the son’s house to simulate the security features, including holograms, windowed threads and UV patterns.

The second currency workshop was led by cash security consultants Secura Monde International, focusing on the importance of, and interaction between, the various machine-readable technologies available on the market today. These included both level 2 features used by the commercial sector and level 3 features used by central banks.

The following day, the main conference programme was launched with a welcome address by the Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, Dr P Nandalal Weerasinghe, followed by an overview of currency management in the country. John Winchcombe of Reconnaissance then shared the latest cash trends and developments across the Asian region.

The programme was subsequently divided into parallel tracks for currency and travel/identity documents, allowing delegates to choose their areas of interest. The sessions covered the critical themes of the identity and currency lifecycle, from innovation, design, security, production and automation to recycling and sustainability. In all, over 40 presentations were delivered.

Some highlights included:

• Note Printing Australia’s presentation of its award-winning R-Series passport. The newly released passport provided an interesting example of using UV-based features to complement and enhance overt and covert design elements such as impregnated substrate fibres, multi-coloured StarLites™ (planchettes), earthy-coloured stitching threads, and full-colour offset-printed images.

Australia’s R-Series passport – 'Possum and Wallaby Dreaming' mosaic in offset interacting with the polycarbonate features under UV light (© Note Printing Australia).

• Landqart presented a physical/digital innovation based on its Durasafe® Certify paper-polymer composite substrate and TECH5’s technologies for issuance and offline verification of digital IDs.

• Gleitsmann Security Inks, now part of IN Groupe, presented its mouveink traffic light and mouveink polar security features, which, through a combination of proprietary pigments in one single ink, provide a series of unique effects under UV light, including an afterglow.

Gleitsmann’s mouveink polar: the next generation of mouveink (© Gleitsmann).

• IQ Structures presented its IQ Check solution incorporating machine-readable holograms, for applications ranging from ID cards to brand protection. The solution works by the user tilting the hologram up and down and from side to side, in front of a smartphone camera equipped with a special app, so that the camera can pick up the hologram’s unique visual effects and subsequently authenticate it. The hologram is created from micro-segmentation technology, where any attempt to manipulate it ends up disintegrating the hologram into thousands of miniature parts.

IQ Structures’ IQ Check solution for authenticating holograms with a smartphone (© IQ Structures).

• Micaal Sidorov, General Secretary of the International Hologram Manufacturers Association (IHMA), unveiled the Security Image Register. This expansion of the Hologram Image Register will enable feature developers, printers and issuers to register all their optically variable features in a secure registry to help protect copyrights and avoid lookalikes (see ABN’s sister publication Holography News®, December 2023).

• On the sustainability front, Hunkeler Systems reviewed how central banks are disposing of unfit banknotes, pointing out that mixed substrates are becoming the norm and that separation is crucial to destruction. Then, Brazil-based Blendpaper explained how it could recycle both waste from the paper-making process and shredded printed banknote paper waste for reuse in the production of new paper.

Regional awards

Another highlight of the conference was the presentation of the regional HSP Asia awards (HSPA), with three categories for Banknote of the Year and three for ID Document of the Year.

And the winners this year were:

Regional banknote

• Best New Series – National Bank of the Kyrgyz Republic for its 5th banknote series 

• Best New Banknote – Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas for the 1,000 Piso

• Best New Commemorative Banknote – jointly awarded to the Central Bank of Samoa and China Banknote Printing and Minting Corporation.

Regional ID Document

• Best New ePassport – Australian Passport Office for the new R-series passport 

• Best New ID card – the Philippines for its national ID card.

The next HSP Asia will be held from 2-4 December 2024 in Bangkok, Thailand.