Since our earliest days, Entrust Datacard has contributed to an identity and payments ecosystem that enables seamless, secure interactions. Today, we help our customers and their clients confidently make payments and cross borders, log into networks, enter buildings, shop online and more.

In 2019 we’re celebrating a heritage of innovation in secure identity and payments that started way back in 1969, when a Minneapolis-based businessman named Bill Drake saw an opportunity in a commercial credit card industry just getting ready to explode.

He founded Datacard to fill a gap in the market for a high-speed, high-quality, high-security personalized plastic card production system. Drake and his team could see a world where payment cards and identity credentials were quickly converging with computing and information systems.

Our world has changed dramatically over the next 50 years. And yet, our focus has always been on adapting and innovating new technology solutions to age old challenges:

  • How can people who don’t know each other communicate and transact securely?
  • How do you negotiate trust and security at scale?
  • How do you create trusted identities across distance and time – in a world that never stops moving?

This is why the rapid convergence of digital and physical identity and commerce led us to acquire public key infrastructure (PKI) pioneer Entrust in 2014. It’s why we’ve added, adapted and innovated solutions over the years to enable secure access cards, national IDs, instant issuance, certificate management, multifactor authentication and managed PKI.

And as the need for data security and compliance multiplies from mobile devices and cloud services to connected IoT devices and digital payments, it’s why we acquired Hardware Security Module (HSM) leader Entrust in June 2019. As the digital transformation accelerates, HSMs have become a core part of this trusted security, identity and payments ecosystem.

In June, we kicked off our 50th anniversary celebration by holding the first Entrust Datacard Vision conference. Vision 2019 brought together customers, partners and industry experts on the future of security in digital, identity and payments.

This was a unique gathering, and a great reminder that we are part of a security community – a true ecosystem. Because if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past 50 years it is this: there is no one company, no magic bullet technology that can solve these age-old challenges all at once. We solve these challenges in collaboration with our customers and partners.

So this week, as our 2,000+ employees in 34 countries take time out to mark a half-century of innovation for our customers, let me share our thanks to our customers, partners and our industry for a great 50 years in business – and here’s to working with you for the next 50!

A snapshot of our journey since 1969.