How digital printing can address the smart card industry

Today the plastic card and more precisely the smart card (chip card) market is growing up very fast in all segment application (mobile phone, bank, identity, loyalty,...). This growth come also with the request from the customer and/or the application to have a dedicated product in a very large scale of production batches, from few cards to few million cards. At the end, final customers want to have a unique product but at a very low cost. We are facing the problematic of large volume production but where each product can be different, personalized, customized. This problematic is today a difficult reality and the plastic card manufacturers and suppliers are searching solution in order to answer positively this demand. Digital Printing could be a very interesting solution but request to change significantly the organization of production actually in place and introduce also several technological challenge. In this paper, the traditional manufacturing flows of plastic card is described with more attention on the printing, personalization processes and their associated problematic. A simulation use of Digital Printing will be also proposed, and forecasted results compared to the actual flows.