Passport Democratic Republic of the Congo personalized on Datacard PB6500 systems

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is located in central Africa and is (in area) the second largest country on the African continent. The country has approximately 70 million inhabitants. In order to create a national identity management system and for the production of a new biometric e-passport the country has selected Semlex Group. With over 20 years of experience on the African market this company is specialized in providing high quality biometric identification and authentication systems, often under challenging circumstances.

Datacard PB6500

As a base for the personalization of the Congolese e-passport Semlex has chosen our Datacard PB6500 systems. With these industrial machines, large numbers of passports can be personalized fully automatically. Decisive for Semlex were the limited footprint of the PB6500, the flexible personalization options and the high reliability. In addition, for smaller (decentralized) passport productions, desktop equipment is provided and it was important that the output of both issuance processes is a close-match.

Biometric data

The first step in the PB6500 personalization process is opening the passport booklet by means of a so-called Leafer-module. Camera’s check if the correct booklet is being used and that the booklet is opened at the right page. Next, the Chip Encoding-module is being used for loading data in the passport chip. In this step, the data of the passport holder including the for e-passports required biometric data, such as fingerprints, is stored in the contactless chip.

Visual personalization

For the visual personalization of the passport a Color inkjet-module is used which aligns the data with the booklet page prior to printing and subsequently applies the inkjet print and dries it. At the end of the PB6500 personalization process a Quality Assurance-module assures that the chip- and inkjet-data is verified with the data available in the data stream and an Overlay-module is being used to apply a protective holographic foil over the printed passport data.