The Future of Documents

I had the great pleasure of presenting the Evolution of the Document in Sao Paulo last week, during the “Document 2.0: O Futuro dos Documentos no Seu Negocio” series of events in Sao Paulo. I had heard that Brazil was very advanced and technology-savvy, but this is really an understatement – not to mention how friendly and dynamic the brazilians are !

 Anyway, one of the customer problems we discussed there was how to protect documents printed in Black and White, such as checks or bank statements. The Brazilian Financial market is very eager for such technologies, as checks are still heavily used, but also heavily counterfeited. But they are usually printed in B&W – technologies such as IR marks, Glossmarks, and UV printing can protect color documents very efficiently and prevent counterfeiting, but what aboult greyscale ?

At least two technologies could help our Brazilian customers, but also others around the world, to prevent counterfeiting and copying of their B&W documents:

- Microprinting (which I spoke about a while back) allows customized text to be printed almost invisibly on the document, and the content can be correlated to information  readable to the human eye, in the original check (e.g. customer name, check number, amount if applicable, etc…).

This way, the clerk could use a magnifying lens to verify on the spot whether the microprint matches other information in the document, and therefore confirm it has not been counterfeited (indeed, the microtext would not survive a  copy, and recreating customized microtext matching the content of the check would be virtually impossible).

- Correlation Marks take advantage of spatial correlations in halftone screens to create a self-authenticating watermarks through an invisible pattern that can be revealed with a simple transparency. The information is generated during the printing process, without any visible effect on the document – even with a magnifying lens: it just looks like a uniform grey area (or greyscale image) on your document. But it contains a unique watermark which can be revealed through a transparency which contains a “key”, which, when overlaid on top of the grey zone, reveals the watermark.

Again, clerks could use a simple revealing device to instantly validate the authenticity of a check. Overlaying the device on the grey or greyscale area would let them reveal a watermark matching other information in the check – and this would be even harder to counterfeit.

Using these two security measure should go a long way protecting customer documents, especially that they do not require any special printer or ink. The good news is, all is required is a Xerox printer with the right software,FreeFlow® VI Correlation Mark and GlossMark® Fonts 6.0.