Twenty-five years of getting cards into people's hands
SecureID has been in the ID card business for twenty-five years, working with New Zealand universities, polytechnics and secondary schools. In that time the card has changed from a laminated photograph to a printed, encoded, remotely-revocable credential that also lives on a phone. The problem has not changed at all. CardOffice is our answer to it.
What twenty-five years teaches you
That the hard part of an ID card programme is never the printer. It is collecting a usable photograph of every person, keeping one honest record of who holds what, and being able to answer “is this card real?” and “who revoked it?” long after the person who issued it has left.
Everything in the platform exists because a card office needed it. The photo pre-screen exists because staff were reviewing thousands of unusable photographs by hand. Template versioning exists because a design change once made reprints inconsistent with the cards already issued. Consumables tracking exists because somebody ran out of ribbon in enrolment week.
Why we built our own platform
We started as a card bureau, so we have run the process we are now asking institutions to trust us with. CardOffice is the result: not a card designer with a database bolted on, but a system that treats a credential as a record with a lifecycle: issued, verifiable, updatable and revocable, that happens to be printed and happens to also live in a wallet.
It is built and supported in New Zealand, for institutions in New Zealand and Australia, by people who will answer the phone.
The person behind it
CardOffice is founded and built by Peter Higbee, who has spent twenty-five years in ID cards for New Zealand institutions, designing them, printing them by the tens of thousands, and running the enrolment weeks and card counters where the work actually happens.
That history is why the platform is opinionated about photographs, records and revocation rather than fonts and clip art, and why, when you ring, you are talking to the person who built the system, not a reseller of somebody else's.
Peter is on LinkedIn, feel free to look him up before you book a consultation.
Who we work with
Universities, polytechnics and institutes of technology; secondary schools; and government agencies and enterprises issuing staff, contractor and visitor credentials. If you issue ID cards to more than a few hundred people a year, we have probably seen your situation before.