At a glance
- Sector: Government — national identity documents
- Our role: We build the personalisation and issuing software behind national ID documents — as prime contractor, or as the software partner printers and integrators rely on
- Platform: PrintFlow, our personalisation and issuing engine
- Reach: National ID programmes on four continents, delivered through state printers and integrators
Challenge
A passport, an eID card, a residence permit — each is only as trustworthy as the system that personalises and issues it. Behind every document runs a chain almost no one sees: data preparation, encrypted order files, keys held in hardware security modules, laser engraving and chip encoding, four-eyes authorisation, and a tamper-evident audit trail. Every link is a place where a national identity system can quietly fail.
Governments seldom build this themselves. They rely on state security printers and system integrators — who in turn need a software partner that understands both the cryptography and the unforgiving operational reality of issuing documents at national scale, to standards that leave no room for error.
Approach
RaulWalter builds that software — sometimes as the prime contractor, sometimes as the partner a state printer or integrator brings in to build the layer that has to be exactly right: personalisation and issuing. Across these programmes runs one core engine — what we now call PrintFlow. Among what we have delivered:
- a complete personalisation-and-issuing infrastructure for a national eID — products, operations, PIN/PUK issuance at service counters, key management and audit, with users authenticated by the citizen's own eID and the source code handed to the state to own;
- personalisation software that decrypts a national registry's order files inside an HSM, batches them, drives the laser-and-chip personalisation machines, and reports every document to the national audit trail — for adult and minor ID cards alike;
- secure-document software that a state security printer runs to personalise documents for its own government customers around the world.
Common to all of it: HSM-backed key management, four-eyes control over sensitive operations, hash-chained tamper-evident audit trails, and conformance to the standards each national programme is held to.
Outcome
The systems we've built sit inside national identity programmes on four continents — most of them invisible to the citizen holding the card, all of them load-bearing.
- 2M+ ID documents a day personalised through systems and software we've built
- National ID infrastructure on four continents — from Europe and South America to the Middle East, and, through the state printers we supply, further still
- Passports, eID cards, residence permits and national ID cards — adult and minor — personalised and issued
- Built to the bar national identity demands: HSM key management, four-eyes control, tamper-evident audit — and, where it mattered, handed to the state to run itself
- The proven core of PrintFlow — RaulWalter's personalisation and issuing platform, hardened in national systems before it was ever packaged as a product