The Rayleigh, Essex-based firm has bought two new Atlantic Zeiser Persomaster machines, three Entrust Datacard MX6100 card issuance systems and an AutoFeeds Cartan card system encapsulation machine.
All of the new kit was bought direct from the manufacturers and installed at TCT’s 3,700sqm site this month.
The 176-staff business said the investment, which brings loyalty keyfob encapsulation in-house and increases efficiency, was driven by increasing customer demand for its payments, gift, loyalty and membership card services.
The purchases follow success in 2016 where TCT, which has a turnover of £15.9m, achieved a 45% growth in gross margin and doubled its budgeted profit expectation.
The Atlantic Zeiser Persomasters, which join a fleet of existing Atlantic Zeiser devices at the firm, offer a high-speed drop-on-demand card personalisation system for all types of plastic card.
They streamline and accelerate the card production process by encoding data on the magnetic stripe, contact chip and contactless interface, printing information onto both sides of the card, attaching scratch labels and performing camera-automated verification in a single pass.
The Entrust Datacard MX6100 machines, which are replacing older embossing systems at the company, will improve card personalisation capacity and services for the banking market. These machines are said to optimise smart card personalisation and deliver edge-to-edge printing and more efficient insertion of cards and carriers into envelopes.
The Autofeeds Cartan device will support card-based use cases like loyalty and membership. This additional equipment is capable of encapsulating and punching shaped cards or keyfobs in a single pass.
TCT managing director Paul Underwood said: “These machines will give us a greater capacity – we are really focused on the markets in which we’re experts and believe this extra capacity is needed to be able to offer larger volumes of cards in market sectors including the banking pre-paid space or the customer loyalty or membership areas.
“We believe the volumes are out there and by bringing in this equipment it will allow us to produce a much higher volume of cards a lot more efficiently.”
He added: “We didn’t rush into this, we had a programme here of looking at the various capex in the various processes and we looked at all of the alternative suppliers of this technology before finally deciding on these machines. We feel that we’ve settled on the best – we want to have the best equipment here to be able to produce the best and most reliable products.”
TCT recently completed its senior management recruitment programme, which began with the appointment of its first chief executive in the early part of last year.
