Entrust Brand Guidelines: Datacard’s 1969 Card Machines Under a Software Name

Embossing machines for plastic cards.

Entrust began as a card-machine maker. The company now called Entrust traces its roots to Datacard Corporation, founded in 1969; English Wikipedia and the IT History Society both name Willis K. Drake as its founder. A campus-card industry timeline compiled by the consultancy Robert Huber Associates, last revised in 2014, says Data Card was formed that year to make plastic card embossing equipment, the machines that press names and numbers into credit cards. English Wikipedia says the early business focused on systems that let banks and retailers produce payment cards more quickly, and that it later expanded into the secure personalisation of identity cards and passports.

Ownership changed in 1987. English Wikipedia says Datacard had been publicly traded before it was acquired that year by the family investment office of Germany’s Quandt family, which it says remains the long-term owner; the Huber timeline says the family bought the company from National Computer Systems. The same timeline lists Datacard installing multi-application smart-card systems on college campuses in 1990, and credits it with an early desktop card printer in 1991.

The Huber timeline also records purchases of the French smart-card company Gilles Leroux in 2003, of Card Personalization Systems Technology in 2006 and of Dynamic Card Solutions in 2010. English Wikipedia adds that in April 2000 Datacard bought Platform Seven, a smart-card technology unit created by the British bank NatWest.

A software name from Nortel.

The Entrust name came from software. English Wikipedia says Entrust’s public key infrastructure software, which manages the digital certificates and keys behind encrypted connections, was first released in January 1994 inside the Secure Networks group of the Canadian telecoms company Northern Telecom, or Nortel. In December 1996 Nortel spun that group off as Entrust Technologies, keeping a majority stake. The private-equity firm Thoma Bravo took Entrust private in July 2009, Wikipedia says.

In 2013 Datacard bought Entrust from Thoma Bravo, and the combined business took the name Entrust Datacard; Wikipedia dates the new name to 2014. Card hardware and security software then grew side by side. In February 2019 SecurityWeek reported that Entrust Datacard had signed a definitive agreement with Thales to acquire the nCipher general-purpose hardware security module division. The European Union had required Thales to separate nCipher before it could complete its purchase of Gemalto, the report said, and financial details were not disclosed. Todd Wilkinson, then president and chief executive, called the deal a complement to the company’s expertise “in both cryptography and hardware.”

On 14 September 2020 the company dropped “Datacard” from its name. Global Security Mag reported the announcement that day: Entrust Datacard became Entrust, with a new logo, brand colours, website, tagline and positioning, and the legal entity became Entrust Corporation, according to Wikipedia. The announcement said Datacard would remain the product-line name for the company’s high-volume card issuance systems, and that nCipher’s nShield hardware security modules would keep their name as an Entrust product line.

By then the software side had grown well beyond its first product. The same report listed recent purchases of the certificate providers Trustis and Safelayer and of the authentication provider SMS Passcode, alongside nCipher, and said the company was investing in new card issuance technology as well as in authentication, digital signing and identity management.

Screening and identity hardware.

Security screening and identity hardware is mostly seen in passing: the X-ray tunnel at an airport checkpoint, the arch a traveller walks through, the grey trays that slide back along a roller track. The companies that make this equipment sell to airports, customs services, border agencies, banks and governments rather than to the public, and their brands are built for procurement teams, regulators and trade-fair visitors.

Their imagery follows the equipment. Websites and brochures show security lanes with scanner tunnels and conveyor belts, walk-through metal detectors, cargo portals and gantries that a lorry drives through, and the operator screens on which bags appear as layered X-ray images. Identity makers work at a different scale: card printers small enough for an office desk, and the production lines on which passports, bank cards and ID cards are made and personalised.

Much of the business is about approvals and contracts. Makers name the regulators whose lists or standards their machines appear on, such as the US Transportation Security Administration or the European Civil Aviation Conference, and announce orders airport by airport and agency by agency. New products are shown at trade fairs such as Passenger Terminal Expo for airport equipment and Security Essen in Germany, where screening, access-control and identity companies exhibit side by side.

Ownership in this field changes often. Some of the makers in this guide were built from acquisitions or sit inside larger listed groups, and some have changed hands recently: Smiths Detection passed from Smiths Group to CVC Capital Partners in June 2026. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Identity purchases and a certificate setback.

Since the rename Entrust has kept buying in identity. English Wikipedia lists the purchase of WorldReach Software of Ottawa, which built digital identity and travel-document systems for governments and border programmes, in April 2021, and the completion of its purchase of the British identity-verification firm Onfido in April 2024.

The certificate business brought a public setback. On 27 June 2024 Google’s Chrome Root Program announced on the Google Security Blog that Chrome would stop trusting, by default, new website certificates chaining to Entrust’s roots, saying its concerns had eroded confidence in Entrust’s competence, reliability and integrity as a publicly trusted certificate authority owner; a later update set the start for Chrome 131 on 12 November 2024, and the post pointed affected website operators to the continuity options offered by Entrust itself. English Wikipedia says certificates issued before the cut-off were not affected, that Mozilla set a similar cut-off for Firefox of 30 November 2024, and that on 29 January 2025 Entrust sold its public certificate authority business to Sectigo, while continuing to offer private and managed certificate systems.

Today English Wikipedia describes Entrust as an American company headquartered in Shakopee, Minnesota, developing hardware and software for card and ID issuance, identity verification, authentication and key management. It says Tony Ball was named in July 2025 to succeed Todd Wilkinson as chief executive from 31 March 2026.

For a design guide, Entrust shows how a hardware company can take the name of the software business it bought while keeping its own original name on the machines. Compare Zebra, the American barcode-printer maker, and IDEMIA, another name in identity documents. For this guide we use a deep indigo, slate and a warm amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Entrust’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.