Markets We Serve
ID & Secure Documents
ePassports, national ID cards and secure credentials — the intelligence behind how identity documents are designed, produced and protected.
Identity documents sit at the intersection of security engineering, biometrics and government policy. Reconnaissance International has tracked this market since our founding in 1988, following the full lifecycle of ePassports, national ID cards, visas and other secure credentials — from document design and security feature selection through to issuance, personalisation and border deployment — for governments, printers, technology suppliers and system integrators worldwide.
ID & Secure Document News is our dedicated title for the sector, covering ePassport programmes, national ID rollouts, biometric credentials and the security features designed to keep them safe from counterfeiting and fraud. It is the publication issuers and their supply chains turn to for programme news, technology developments and market analysis.
We bring the identity document community together through our own conference portfolio — including the Security Designers Forum, Optical & Digital Document Security and our High Security Printing series across Asia, EMEA and the Americas — plus specialist forums covering the design, production and authentication challenges facing document issuers today.
Where clients need more than news, our consultancy team draws on the same first-hand knowledge that underpins our publications and events to provide market research, competitive intelligence and government advisory work for document issuers, printers and technology providers.
Latest From Our Newsletters
ID & Secure Document News
29 June 2026
The Rise and Rise of the Barcode
Barcodes have long sat awkwardly in the secure document world. They are fast and cheap, but easily copyable. A barcode is printed data, making it easy to clone, reprint or alter. But the industry is rethinking what a barcode is and what it can do. Instead of just holding a reference number that points to a record in a database, the barcode increasingly carries the actual identity data plus a digital signature from the issuer, drastically increasing its security and usefulness.
ID & Secure Document News
27 May 2026
Nano-Engineered Optics for Passport and ID Card Protection
Counterfeiters are no longer limited to simple print and overlay methods to make counterfeit security features. High-resolution imaging, better foils, and wider access to precision tooling mean that many familiar ‘tilt effects’ can be imitated well enough to pass quick, first-line checks – especially on identity cards and passport datapages where the attack is aimed at the portrait and personal data.
ID & Secure Document News
27 April 2026
Editorial – Metrology is the Glue of Trade
This is probably not the most attention-grabbing title for an editorial, but for a while I worked at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London, where part of the lab’s job is supporting standards work through the British Standards Institution (BSI). That experience left me with two impressions about metrology.