“Authentix works with our clients (or their vendors) directly to train, certify, and document the necessary security and manufacturing SOPs for large-scale production”

Businesses across multiple industries including central banks, national governments, and global brand companies share a common challenge of verifying the provenance of physical products and items in a particular supply chain ecosystem. They also look to make those products digitally connected through software-enabled systems to track product journeys, engage consumers, and enable product inspectors to police the process. When products or other assets pass to the consumer through often unregulated and chaotic global supply chains, it is easy to lose visibility of these goods and lack the capability to track or confirm which goods have reached legitimate points of sale and whether counterfeit or illicit goods have been sold or consumed by the consumers. This can cause safety issues, loss of revenue, create a hit to brand reputation, and result in loss of customer loyalty. This is where Authentix—an authentication solutions company specializing in supply chain protection—is delivering game-changing solutions. Authentix has developed authentication solutions for products, personnel, and processes that bring the physical and digital worlds together.

As a security solutions provider, Authentix offers multiple layers of authentication capability. The company uses both covert and overt physical systems to allow unique discoveries of product compromise issues only detectable by its clients. The company can then couple these covert physical attributes to a digital twin (usually a digital code in the form of a 2D data matrix or encrypted QR code) which can verify each product’s provenance and journey through the supply chain while enabling inspectors to verify these products individually via a mobile app. Moreover, if desired, this technology also allows consumers to verify the same or other information without a mobile app using the AppLESS™ mobile solution. These tools working together can close the loop, bringing visibility to previous supply chain blind spots and ultimately provide multilayer and multifactor authentication capability to connect the consumer to the brand owner to allow product journey tracking and obtain consumer preferences and purchasing trends. “Authentix works with our clients (or their vendors) directly to train, certify, and document the necessary security and manufacturing SOPs for large-scale production,” explains Kent Mansfield, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, Authentix.

Scalability is quite robust with Authentix’s solutions, whether using a multi-layered covert physical feature, using a digital feature alone, or combining both the covert physical and digital features. Since the Authentix track and trace software platform is cloud-based, it can easily scale being able to issue and manage billions of unique product-level codes. Also, Authentix provides unique digital code generation and issuance and handles code lifecycle management throughout the life of the program to track the presence of even outdated or expired products which could be introduced to the supply chain years after its original production and release.

While most companies use multifactor authentication to ensure credentials for user access to software platforms and other secure transactional events, Authentix is unique in that its multi-layered and multifactor authentication solutions tie together the credentialing of physical items, user credentials, and event/transaction history. In this case, by building a database of relational transaction events that see each subsequent transaction in relation to the characteristics of multiple preceding events logged, the Authentix machine learning algorithms can detect whether each transaction is suspect or needs escalated review based on the trends and unique attributes of a collection of preceding and related events.

Since opening its doors over 20 years ago, Authentix has been securing the infrastructure and data of a variety of clients across the globe while providing the highest level of visibility and scalability. An instance that highlights the company’s value proposition is when the team assisted a client in the spirits and wine industry by deploying a multi-layered set of security features to certain product labels that can reveal a hidden 4-digit PIN. Inspectors use proprietary field readers to detect and confirm the covert label feature to verify product authenticity. If the scratch-off PIN and the product’s QR code are scanned or used again in the future, this represents a security violation. The client has seen substantial reductions in counterfeit attempts, has found and prosecuted retailers who traffic in illicit products, and has created new ways to engage with and build their consumers’ trust in the process.

Authentix today has offices on four continents and does business across the globe, delivering services to most of the world. “We see future expansion with the market and sector growth in providing a digital connection between goods and products, consumers, and manufacturers to create end-to-end visibility of the supply chain in both directions while using multiple levels of security to help manufacturers detect and eliminate product compromise. This will also enable the consumer to take part in the verification process and further connect directly and interact with the manufacturers of their favored brands,” concludes Mansfield.