IDEMIA Brand Guidelines: Morpho Biometrics, Oberthur Cards and a Name Coined in 2017

Two French businesses, one new name.

IDEMIA is a young name built from two older businesses. English Wikipedia describes it as a French multinational headquartered in Courbevoie, in the Île-de-France region, that sells identity, biometric and payment technology to governments and companies. It was formed in 2017, when the private-equity firm Advent International, which had owned the card and security-printing group Oberthur Technologies since 2011, bought the identity and security business of the French defence group Safran. Wikipedia dates Safran’s announcement of exclusive negotiations to September 2016 and the completion of the sale to 31 May 2017. The combined company first traded as OT-Morpho and took the name IDEMIA, styled in capitals, on 28 September 2017.

The Morpho half began as Morpho Systèmes, created in 1982, according to Wikipedia, which links the name to a 1980s fingerprint-identification firm. It was absorbed by the electronics group Sagem in 1993. When Sagem merged with Snecma to form Safran in 2005, the identity work moved into Sagem Défense Sécurité, and in 2007 into a separate company, Sagem Sécurité; it was renamed Morpho in 2010 and Safran Identity & Security in 2016. Along the way it bought the German card maker ORGA Kartensysteme in 2005, which became Sagem Orga; took a majority of GE Homeland Protection, General Electric’s security-screening affiliate, in 2009; and completed the purchase of the American company L-1 Identity Solutions in July 2011. Wikipedia says much of that last business now sits within MorphoTrust USA.

The Oberthur half was put together in 2007, when Oberthur Card Systems, Oberthur Fiduciaire and Oberthur Cash Protection were merged into a single company, Oberthur Technologies, Wikipedia says. It describes the aim of the 2017 merger as bringing together technology developed for the public sector by the former Morpho and for the private sector by Oberthur Technologies.

Fingerprints, faces, chips and cards.

The product range is wide. English Wikipedia lists automated fingerprint identification systems, facial, iris and finger-vein recognition, biometric terminals and e-gates, identity cards and ePassports, payment cards and SIM cards among IDEMIA’s products. It also describes biometric bank cards, on which a fingerprint check made on the card itself replaces the PIN code, and payment cards made from recycled plastic. In July 2025, Wikipedia adds, citing L’Usine Digitale, the company launched a library of 68 classical and post-quantum cryptographic algorithms.

Identity work is what Wikipedia calls the company’s historical core business. It lists India’s Aadhaar programme, which gives each enrolled citizen a unique 12-digit number linked to fingerprints, iris scans and a portrait, among the company’s references. In the United States the company owns IdentoGO, a chain of storefronts that take electronic fingerprints and, Wikipedia says, enrol travellers and workers for Transportation Security Administration programmes such as TSA PreCheck. Arizona’s transport department launched a mobile driver’s licence app with IDEMIA in 2021, The Arizona Republic reported, as cited by Wikipedia.

The company’s own website now groups the work under two businesses. IDEMIA Secure Transactions covers payment cards, connectivity such as eSIM, and cybersecurity products including a hardware security module called Sphere. IDEMIA Public Security covers trusted access, justice and public safety, travel, and identity services in North America, with named lines such as the BORDERGUARD border-control suite, the PaXpress passenger-processing family for airlines, airports, cruise lines, ferries and railways, and the MFACE face terminal, now in a second generation. The same site lists driver’s licence work for American motor-vehicle agencies and enrolment points for the TSA.

Design and documentation.

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.

A group taken apart in stages.

The group has been changing shape. In February 2024, the company says, it reorganised into three divisions. The first to be sold was IDEMIA Smart Identity, the identity-document business. On 1 July 2025 IDEMIA announced that the sale to IN Groupe was complete, and Biometric Update reported the same day that IN Groupe, the French document printer that grew out of the Imprimerie Nationale and whose sole shareholder is the French state, had taken over the unit. IDEMIA said the deal left it focused on its two remaining pillars, IDEMIA Secure Transactions and IDEMIA Public Security.

The second sale is under way. On 29 April 2026 Biometric Update reported that the travel-technology company Amadeus had announced its intention to buy IDEMIA Public Security from Advent International, adding it to Vision-Box, the airport face-recognition business Amadeus bought in 2024. The report said the deal was subject to the usual approvals and expected to close in mid-2027. Until then, IDEMIA Group remains owned by Advent; Wikipedia names Pierre Barrial as chief executive from July 2020, and the company’s 2025 release quotes Jean-François Cirelli as executive president of the group.

One episode from the Morpho side reached a French court. In September 2012 the BBC reported that a Paris court had fined Safran, known as Sagem until its 2005 merger, for bribes paid to Nigerian officials between 2000 and 2003 to win a contract to produce national identity cards; Safran said it would appeal against the decision.

The name itself, styled in capitals, replaced the hyphenated OT-Morpho within four months of the merger, and the older Morpho and Oberthur names passed into the group’s history. The company’s own pages now present its businesses through product families with trademarked names, from BORDERGUARD to PaXpress.

For a design guide, IDEMIA shows how a merged company can trade under one invented word while its parts are sold off one by one. Compare Entrust, another maker of card and identity systems, and Evolis, the French card-printer maker. For this guide we use a night indigo, a deep violet and a coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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