IQ Structures Turns National Symbols into Defence Against Counterfeiters

As IQ Structures, a member of the IQS Group, expands its capacity to protect over 1 billion documents a year, it is looking at ways to simplify the job of the document inspector and frustrate the work of the counterfeiter.

There has, for some time, been a problem in document inspection in that, as optically variable security technologies become more advanced, the complexity for officials whose job it is to check them increases. To address this, IQ Structures has developed an approach that uses the national symbols of a country to create a suite of anti-counterfeiting imagery across the country’s various national identity documents – ID card, passport, driving licence, social security card… 

IQ Structures, which operates from secure premises on a nuclear reactor site in Řež in the Czech Republic, has branded this approach as the National Identity Guard (NIG), with each country getting its own custom design. In recent months, NIG designs have been developed for a number of countries in Africa, America, Asia, and Europe, including Spain which is shown in the image above.