Underneath the colossal arc of London’s St. Pancras International train station’s glass roof, passengers shuffle towards the platform as the first glimpse of a sunrise yet to come casts glints of light from the rafters. It’s just after 5 a.m., and folks are beginning to queue up to board the high-speed train to Paris. It’s not surprising that a train station would feel sleepy and slow at a time like this, but this year, things have felt even slower than usual for those taking the first train of the morning out of the station and under the English Channel. And that’s because they are.
Following Brexit’s official enactment, border control at train stations and airports for passengers traveling between the UK and Europe became a new hurdle, that turned into a significant stumbling block for operations. Because all passengers must now have their passports verified between the two destinations, getting passengers through the check-in process became considerably slower than it used to be. So much slower, in fact, that at the beginning of the year, high-speed railway Eurostar was forced to cap ticket sales at 550 passengers for 6:01 a.m. train out of St. Pancras to Paris, leaving 350 seats empty in an attempt to prevent a bottleneck of queues that would undoubtedly delay the trains.
The issue at stations is not “impossible to tackle” Gwendoline Cazenave, the CEO of Eurostar, told the press. “We have to be better organized…We have to automize more than before.”
Since, Eurostar has done just that.
In just a few short months, the experience you can have as a passenger boarding a Eurostar train in St. Pancras changed drastically, thanks to the implementation of Smartcheck using Digital Travel Credentials (DTCs), which leverage biometrics. Once reserved for internal government use only (fingerprinting has been around quite some time), a revolution in applied biometrics has opened identification technology up to practical applications—like, say, opening our phone’s lock screen or allowing us to skip the ID check line at the airport. The new, everyday applications are making our lives simpler, while allowing us to stay in control of our ID and protect our privacy rather than endangering it. It’s only through identity and data security industry leaders like Entrust that such security around these everyday uses of biometrics is possible. By innovating applied encryption, Entrust is pioneering solutions that allow us to use the data we need to automize our travel, while still keeping that data secure.
According to the International Civil Aviation Organization (which is a specialized agency within the United Nations that outlines the principles of international air navigation), a DTC is intended to temporarily or permanently substitute a conventional passport with a digital representation of the traveler’s identity that can, “be validated using the travel document issuing authority’s public key infrastructure.” Which is a fancy way of saying that the data DTCs hold are derived from and verifiable through the electronic signatures of the government bodies that issue passports.
DTCs act as a supplement to a physical passport, reducing verification redundancies and allowing a passenger’s identity to be verified at eGates or using biometric lanes in a fraction of the time it takes at a traditional border control checkpoint. In a world where there are handfuls of passport control apps, private identification services, and online check-in options, a DTC stores the same information as the physical e-passport and can be associated with other travel data such as boarding passes or tickets to provide all of the information you need for each step of the traveling process.
“Typical statistics from an eGate show that you can process an ID verification in about 10 to 15 seconds on average,” says Gordon Wilson, Vice President and Global Lead of Seamless Travel at Entrust, the identity and data security company that partnered with iProov and Eurostar to find a solution for more efficient travel procedures. “Whereas at a traditional checkpoint with an officer, you're spending 30 to 45 seconds per person.” That may not sound like a huge differential, but when you multiply a few seconds by the hundreds of thousands of travelers using major hubs each day, it really adds up. It adds up to minutes saved, more passengers served, more secure border checkpoints, and — this may sound like an oxymoron — but a more relaxed travel experience for all involved.
Eurostar introduced SmartCheck, a contactless, fast-track facial biometric check-in system with a pilot starting in 2022 and has been in full production since July 2023. Entrust, in collaboration with SmartCheck lead partner iProov, and using Inverid’s ReadID, nurtured this program from its pilot stage to its full-scale launch. With SmartCheck, Eurostar passengers can securely enroll their ticket, passport and face before they travel, using their mobile devices whenever convenient. When traveling, they simply walk through the biometric lane, already verified by the contactless, ticketless, and secure verification process.
“This DTC-centered process saves time for both passengers — who have places to be — and security and border agents — who need to focus on high-risk individuals. This process facilitates the average person who's low risk coming to visit friends, go to a concert, or who’s traveling for business conferences, so agents can spend the time on persons of interest,” says Wilson. “So if they can remove 90 percent of the hay — being low-risk travelers — from the haystack, then officers are left with a small haystack that's needle-rich.”
DTCs, unlike traditional physical passports, are also able to act as living documents, which can enable data to help reduce instances of human bias instead of increasing it. As we all know, your driver’s license or passport has one picture on it. And, while passport and ID photos are rarely good, they can also be unreliable since they can be the only physical representation of a person for up to a decade. And let’s face it, most of us don’t look like we did 10 years ago.
DTCs allow you to electronically share the ePassport data and facial image in advance of travel and the IDV process that derives the DTC also captures the most current version of your likeness. When you walk up to the biometric lane or the eGate, your shared DTC supports verifying you using the picture from the passport as well as the photograph that was taken on your phone when your ticket and identity verification was confirmed. “That's where this advantage comes in,” says Wilson. “The data can be matched to more than one photo very quickly. And that photo can be your passport photo, but it can also be your current selfie that you took two or three weeks ago when you bought your ticket.” This ability to supplement data with your DTC without changing the core of the data can help reduce unnecessary ID checks with physical agents and documents.
Because the data within a DTC is controlled by the individual (just like how our passports are our own physical property), data sharing and protection aren’t concerns for users. Encryption protects the data stored, and sharing permissions can be temporary — ensuring that the airlines or government agencies who are accessing the information within your DTC don’t store it permanently. According to Wilson, “most organizations today don't want to keep that information” and would prefer to keep it out of a risk profile.
Because of the security and ease that a DTC can provide to make travel more efficient for travelers, industry professionals, and travel companies too, there’s a desire to adopt them more widely. In fact, 85 percent of travelers who took a survey about international travel use stated that they are: 1., willing to give their identification information in advance for check-in and verification; 2., are happy with their experience using a DTC and e-gates or biometric lanes; and 3., would use their DTC again for future travel.
So what’s the holdup with making virtual passports the norm while traveling? Uptake.
As all good things do, “it's going to take time,” says Gordon. “We’re probably talking at least two to three years before it becomes broadly available.”
Currently, we are learning from pilot tests how to use the technology, and how it impacts the travel industry’s core systems. There are already examples of how the ability to digitize a passport, even if it's just an optical scan of the data page, ensures that every passenger is verified without error, avoiding time-consuming mistakes like the expiry date of the passport or the passport number being wrong. This next phase is really about leveling up the confidence level between both travel service providers and the government. “I think it's really about connecting the dots across the whole of the process. So you have the consumer adoption side, you have government adoption, and you have travel service providers,” says Gordon. “We have to link them all. That takes time.”
But the time spent on making systematic changes within the industry is converting to big efficiencies on the other side, as evidenced by Eurostar. After seeing the success of the SmartCheck pilot, the railway has set its sights on being able to increase capacity by a third, or even 50 percent, without having to add any facilities to its network. That increased efficiency translates to everyone moving faster, with fewer tasks to be concerned with. That could look like border agents having to process fewer passengers that require more face-to-face attention. Or a passenger being able to make it to their meeting on time, or maybe even get to their hotel and take a nap before the meeting. In a game of, in Gordon’s words, “small continuous improvement,” it seems that a truly seamless day of travel could be a thing of the very near future.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Entrust.
