HSP Awards Celebrate Best in Class of 2021

The HSP (High Security Print) Awards are normally held three times a year, coinciding with three regional HSP conferences – for Asia, EMEA and Latin America respectively. The last HSP conference was actually the last in-person event in the entire industry before the world went into lockdown, this was the EMEA event which took place in March 2020 in Lisbon. So Reconnaissance International, organiser of the HSP events, decided to fill the gap by holding a series of virtual awards.

‘The Regional Banknote & ID Document of the Year Awards 2021’, to give the ceremony its proper title, was streamed online. The awards were divided by region (Asia, EMEA and Latin America) and into a number of product categories for both banknotes and ID documents.

The ID Document awards recognise outstanding achievement and technical sophistication of a personal identification or travel document programme. The awards are designed to promote the best in system infrastructure and implementation of a government passport, identity or other secure identification scheme.

The judges for the ID award series were all part of the editorial advisory board of ID & Secure Document News, led by Francis Tuffy, Editor.

Francis opened the ceremony by noting that he had extensively covered the development and roll out of the Bangladesh ePassport programme. Like the other judges he was impressed by the complete overhaul of the whole passport programme – fully justifying the award for Asia’s Best New Passport going to the Bangladesh Department of Immigration and Passports of the Ministry of Home Affairs and Veridos.

Designers often say that they are influenced by the culture of a country when they design a passport but the winner of the EMEA Best New Passport was able to capture the balance between the natural and synthetic worlds that are so popular in this Baltic state. For this reason, the prize for EMEA Best New Passport went to HID Global and the Estonian Police and Border Guard Board for the Estonian ePassport.

The next category found the judges unable to split the entries from two contestants apart. Both were new versions of already successful national ID cards, combining slick design with technology upgrades. So, in the end the prize for EMEA Best New National ID Card was awarded jointly to the French Ministry of the Interior and IN Groupe for the new French eID card and Bundesdruckerei together with Bundeskriminalamt for the new German eID Card.

The Latin America Best New National ID card was loaded with innovative features including connectivity to a mobile phone and use of a QR code. The award went to the Colombian National Vital Statistics Registry and IDEMIA for Colombia’s new eID card.

For the final award, the judges noted that there is a trend amongst ID and travel documents to link identity to a range of government services and that this function was clearly evident in the winner of the Latin America award for Best New ID or Travel Document, which went to the Argentine National Registry of People and HID Global for the Argentinian Smart DNI.

The award ceremony concluded with the invitation to all participants to gather, at the forthcoming HSP conferences in Latin America (14-16 March in Mexico City), EMEA (13-15 June in Tallinn, Estonia) and Asia (5-7 December in Colombo, Sri Lanka).