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Costa Rica Business News:
Digital and biometric ID management for Costa Rican Government


Foreign resident management program in Costa Rica to be supported by digital and biometric ID system supplied by LaserCard.

LaserCard has announced the award of a contract by the government of Costa Rica. The agreement, valued at approximately $1.7 million, is for the supply of an ID Management System for the country’s Foreign Resident program.

This award follows the preliminary phase of the program under which LaserCard previously supplied approximately $500,000 worth of optical memory cards and secure encoders in late 2005.

Under the terms of the agreement, LaserCard will supply a suite of demographic and biometric data collection and card issuance equipment and software solutions to assist the Costa Rican government to manage the issuing of highly secure optical memory based Foreign Resident Cards. The applications include the centralized enrollment of legal foreign residents, automatic fingerprint identification to prevent the issuance of duplicate cards, optical memory encoding and card printing servers, quality assurance and card issuance controlled by LaserCard’s biometric verification system. The issuance process will also include biometric identification of workstation operators and strict card auditing processes.

The contract terms include a limited supply of Foreign Resident ID Cards, which incorporate a number of security features in addition to LaserCard’s secure optical memory. The card’s optical memory will store cardholder information including high resolution color facial image, fingerprint images and templates (for automatic one-to-one identity verification), digitized signature and biographic data. In addition, the optical stripe will also feature LaserCard’s unique Embedded HologramHD, a personalized optical variable device which, like the digital data, cannot be fraudulently altered.

Installation of the system is expected to be completed in the spring of 2008. Revenues from the contract will be deferred until the customer’s acceptance of the equipment, software, and cards which is anticipated to be during the spring or summer of 2008.

“We are pleased and proud to play a leading role in this key homeland security project with the government of Costa Rica. This ongoing relationship is further testament to LaserCard’s optical memory technology and its ability to provide the most secure solution available today,” said Stephen Price-Francis, Vice President of Business Development of LaserCard Corporation. “With this contract, the evolution of our company from technology components supplier to solutions provider continues, building substantially upon the experience we gained in successfully installing an integrated national ID solution for a country in the Middle East.”

The Costa Rica Foreign Resident Card is designed to be interoperable with US and Canadian optical memory-based authentication and ID verification systems. More than 30 million optical memory cards have been issued by the US and Canadian governments with no known case of optical memory’s digital security having been compromised.