The Smart Five Story
Nearly Three Decades of Partnership, Technology and Trust
Every business has a founding moment. Ours was modest: a small South African card-printing business, started in 1998, with more ambition than infrastructure and a simple belief that customers deserved more than just a printer. They deserved a partner who understood what happened after the sale.
Almost thirty years later, that belief hasn’t changed much. What has changed is how far it’s taken us.
The Early Years: Learning the Trade
By 2002, Smart Five was already operating as a card printing bureau, producing pre-printed cards for customers who needed cards without needing to own the equipment themselves. A service model that, decades later, would come back around in a very different form.
Growth in those early years came the hard way, through referrals, repeat business, and a reputation built one customer at a time. In 2005, that groundwork was recognised when Smart Five received the Most Improved Dealer award from Entrust-Datacard, distributed in the region through Altron Fintech. It was an early sign that the approach was working, and it set the tone for a relationship that would shape much of Smart Five’s growth over the next decade.
By 2007, having built our first website in 2004, we’d taken the business beyond South Africa’s borders, exporting products and services into Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Botswana. We also started exhibiting publicly for the first time, a small business finding its voice in a much bigger regional market.
Becoming Entrust-Datacard’s Largest Regional Partner
The momentum that started with that 2005 award kept building. By 2010, Smart Five had grown into Entrust-Datacard’s largest regional channel partner, measured by annual spend, a position we held for more than a decade until the distributor’s measurement programme was eventually discontinued.
It’s a statistic we’re proud of, though not really because of the ranking itself. It reflects something harder to measure: sustained trust, built over years, from customers and from Altron Fintech as our distribution partner. Going from one of the smallest channel partners in Southern Africa to the largest wasn’t the result of one good year or a clever campaign. It took a decade of showing up, solving problems, and doing right by the people who depended on us.
The years that followed built on that foundation. By 2012 we were importing our own range of blank cards. By 2014 we’d built the premises we still operate from today, become certified for support across the full Datacard product range, and launched our second website. Steady, unglamorous growth, the kind that doesn’t make headlines but is what real reliability is built on.
And through all of it, the Entrust-Datacard relationship, backed by Altron Fintech, has stayed a cornerstone of the business. It’s not a chapter that closed to make way for something else. It’s still going strong today.
Expanding the Horizon: Evolis
Technology and customer needs don’t stand still, and a business that wants to keep serving them properly can’t either. In 2022, after years of a proven track record in the industry, Smart Five was welcomed into the Evolis card printer stable.
This wasn’t about replacing what we’d built with Entrust-Datacard. It was about expanding on it. Different customers have different requirements, and having another trusted, globally respected brand on offer meant we could match more organisations to the right technology for their application, rather than trying to fit every customer into one product family.
The relationship grew quickly. By 2024, Smart Five had achieved Gold status with Evolis, one of a small group of dealers to reach that tier, with our sights set on climbing further up the partner ladder. It’s really the same principle that built the Entrust-Datacard relationship in the first place playing out again: growth comes from doing right by the technology partner and the customer at the same time, not from picking one over the other.
Today Smart Five is in the fairly unusual position of offering real, well-supported expertise across two of the industry’s leading card printer brands. Not as a hedge, but as a way of making sure customers get matched to what actually suits them, not just whatever we happen to sell.
Moving With the Times: The Launch of IDaaS
Growth hasn’t only meant adding new printer brands. It has also meant paying attention to how the industry itself is changing shape.
For a long time, owning a printer and managing the software, consumables, training and maintenance around it was simply what card issuance meant. But for a lot of organisations, that ownership model has turned into a distraction from their real purpose. They need cards produced reliably, not another system to run in-house.
That’s what led to our ID as a Service (IDaaS) program, introduced in 2025 alongside the third version of our website. IDaaS brings together card-printing technology, cloud-based software, consumables, training, maintenance and support into a single, predictable, managed service. Card issuance as an outcome, rather than an equipment purchase.
It’s a genuinely new kind of offering for this industry, but it’s not really a departure from what Smart Five has always believed. It’s the same idea behind the bureau work back in 2002, just applied with 2025’s technology: sometimes the best way to help a customer is to carry the operational weight ourselves, so they don’t have to.
The Thread That Connects It All
Looking back across almost thirty years, the early bureau work, the Entrust-Datacard growth story, the move into Evolis, the launch of IDaaS, it would be easy to call this a story about products and partnerships. In a way it is. But that’s not really the point of it.
Every one of those moves happened for the same reason: staying genuinely useful to the people who trust us with their card-printing needs. Adding Evolis didn’t mean stepping back from Entrust-Datacard; it meant having more of the right answers for more customers. Building IDaaS didn’t mean walking away from traditional printer sales; it meant having an option for organisations who need the outcome without the overhead.
For us, progress has never really been about chasing whatever’s newest. It’s about staying close enough to our customers to know what they actually need next, and being willing to keep changing, brand by brand and service by service, to meet them there.
That was true in 1998. It’s still true now. And going by the last twenty-seven years, it’ll probably still be true for a good while yet.
Smart Five Card Solutions has specialised in PVC card printing and ID card issuance since 1998, with dealerships across Entrust-Datacard and Evolis, and our own IDaaS managed service. Talk to Smart Five about the right card-printing solution for your organisation.