Warsaw has just hosted ODDS 2025 – the Optical & Digital Document Security™ conference – and once again, the event proved to be more than just a technical gathering. It was a reminder that secure documents are not dull, bureaucratic artefacts but living examples of human ingenuity. They sit at the intersection of science, design, and trust. They deserve to be celebrated not only for the technologies they embody but for the fundamental role they play in our societies.

In the identity management field, innovation often comes with a sense of urgency. You identify an opportunity, work up a proposal, attend meetings, submit your bid and then (hopefully) Go! Go! Go! At this point, you already have the solution so well worked out with colleagues (and written into an annexe of the contract) that you don’t have time to reconsider what is already in place in the country’s identity framework.

I don’t know whether, like me, you saw a latex face mask staring back at you from a display cabinet at Identity Week Europe, Amsterdam? I had to explore further.

Over the past year, I have found myself returning to a recurring theme: the transition from physical to digital identity is inevitable, but that transition is not without cost. With the growth of electronic identification (eID) systems comes a shift in both the nature and scale of identity-enabled financial crime.

During the lockdowns that typified the COVID pandemic, there was a roughly two-year period during which it was only under very special circumstances that a person could leave their house to visit a government office, a bank or cross a border. This accelerated the requirement for validating someone’s identity remotely. Of course, this ‘person-not-present’ form of ID authentication was prevalent and growing before 2020, but the pandemic accelerated its acceptance.

The secure document and identity sector is going through a period of significant change, driven by mergers and acquisitions that I covered throughout 2024. As we start a new year, I want to take a step back and consider not just the headlines but the historical events and strategic thinking behind them.

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the need for accurate public health data in crisis management, once again highlighting the importance of robust civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems.

The world is rapidly transitioning from physical to digital ID systems, and the approaches to this change across the globe are strikingly varied. How long can this shift to digital identity remain part of critical infrastructure when its implementation is so uneven around the globe?

As advances in artificial intelligence and quantum computing accelerate, a growing sense of concern surrounds their potential to undermine the cryptographic systems that secure our digital identities.

Like all industries, the ID and secure document sector is rightfully coming under scrutiny for its impact on the environment. When I sat down to consider the materials and energy that our industry uses to produce physical documents, I initially thought that I would be pushing at an open door in calling for alternatives to polycarbonate (PC) as the material of choice for passport datapages and cards. But the more I looked into it, the less obvious the choice became.