One ID – To Enable A Seamless Passenger Experience

Transcript

Celine Canu:First, maybe I will introduce myself because, as you will hear with my accent, I'm a French native, and I had the pleasure to start my career in aviation with the European Commission in Brussels in the negotiations of Air Transport Agreement, and it was the start also of my relationship with Canada because I had the honor and the pleasure to work with some of you in the negotiation of the Air Transport Agreement between Canada and the European Union. It was probably announcing then that I would move sometimes to Canada and join IATA there to work first on security and now on facilitation. It's a very fascinating job as I both work on the regulatory aspect of facilitation, passenger process, but also on the innovation part of it. So I was asked to give you a quick introduction of what the IATA OneID project looks like. So first of all, few background information about why we have initiated the project. We discussed it during the last 2 days, but the growth of the industry, the growth of the passenger demand is one of the main motivators, one of the main push beyond— behind it. We expect by 2037, almost 7 billion passengers worldwide. Another aspect also is the passenger experience. Each year we run a passenger survey, the global passenger survey, and, and we are trying to look at what passengers want, what they do not want anymore, what are their hurdles. And identify the aspects of the passenger process that we can improve from an industry perspective. So what do passengers tell us? Um, they don't understand that there's no cooperation between airlines, airports, immigration, customs, security. In fact, for them, we are all the same. They don't necessarily make the distinctions between each of our organizations. So they certainly want a traveling experience which is simplified, efficient, but there's also an environmental constraint and conscious. And I think we— it was part of each of the panels we had until now. It's a challenge, but it's also an opportunity. An opportunity to respond to, to the passengers' demand. One interesting point as well is that travelers are looking at, um, and, and they would be willing to provide biometric information to simplify their process. So some of the questions we ask also, um, if they would be to share additional information possibly at time of booking or anytime after, before their flight, and they were positive. They are also very used to use their smartphone, and I think all of us in the room, if we can have a mobile boarding pass, we'll use the option. And sometimes we prefer to have the paper version just in case, but that's, that's still an opportunity. The queuing time always appears as a hurdle, and the maximum waiting time we see would be 10 minutes. 20% of them do not even want to wait more than 5 minutes. So we've been meeting with our member airline, airports, the Airport Council International, ACI world, a number of government representatives, and we have established a task force to look at how we could all together streamline the passenger process and break those silos that are currently existing. So from there, we started the OneID initiative. It's an IATA-labeled initiative, but in practice, it's really much a project which is run also by airports and governments together with our members. And the aim of the project is really to create a streamlined, friction-free process to allow passengers to assert their identity, ideally at booking already, with the same level of trust and confidence that we currently have with the electronic lecture of, of the e-passport. And importantly, we want to, to preserve the same level of, of security behind the current process. Uh, so how do we do that? Here is It's always useful to refer to some illustration. It might give you an idea. I still want to work with our designer to remove some of the gates and barriers because some like it. I don't think that's the future, but let's say that it will help illustrate the project as well. So the idea is to have the tools to be able to assert your identity already at time of booking. Currently, for those who are familiar with all the functions of the e-passport, you could possibly have your travel authorization in it, in the chip. So the visa, the electronic travel authorizations. Unfortunately, there are some security issues and it's not been done. But in the future, we hope that those capabilities will be unlocked. Notably by the use of a digital credential. So at time of booking, you would know the nationality of the person, the travel authorization that this person has, and you would be able to personalize also the information that you could, as an airline for instance, pull to, to, to the passenger. Does the passenger have the appropriate authorizations or not? Does he need a visa? By when does the visa has to be issued. Those are additional elements that could be added into the project. So you have this information currently airlines already collect in a number of countries and certainly in Canada, both the advanced passenger information and the PNR, the passenger name record that are sent to governments for pre-assessment. Here we would have possibly another data which would be the biometric. So I think we'll keep the questions about what type of biometric for the discussions later on and maybe how they are stored, shared, or used. Are they the biometric themselves or templates? You have this information. Governments can do their Uh, prescreening also in advance. So currently they can only do it at time of checking when they receive the API. Now possibly there would be options to do it much earlier. Um, and it's interesting also, and, um, I'm relying on some feedback we have from, from airlines who are implementing the system already, or some elements of it. Um, they've seen that usually there's, about 2% of the population who want to opt out. So I'm not saying anything, but it could be also an interesting element for the security agency to look at those who want to opt out. So in terms of security, efficiency, and facilitation, we see great potentials in this system. And throughout the process, You don't need to present any document. No boarding pass, no passport. Your biometric is the key to it. So this project relies, or the concept relies on 4 pillars. And I stress the fact that it's a concept. It's not a solution per se. You cannot be OneID compliant. The pillars are the digital identity. And we work with IKO on this specific point, an identity management platform whereby all the stakeholders could access the information on a need-to-know, need-to-access basis. Those rules would be established in the operational framework, and the biometric recognition is a tool. It's the mean by which you will recognize the passenger. Actually, the face is the primary biometric, but it could be fingerprints or iris. So in a nutshell, the benefits are obviously for passengers. We hope to provide them with a seamless experience. Hopefully bring some harmonization also on how the, the passenger process is in each of the airports and countries. Um, the efficiency for both, for the airline, uh, the airport, but also for, for the regulators. We work a lot with your neighbors in the US, and their main driver was to implement some of the OneID type of solution to comply with their regulations. So, and finally, we hope that the system will also bring additional security as now most of the security measures that are taken are more about physical screening, not our, And I'm not just talking about Canada, but worldwide, there's not so much security which is performed for passengers. So with this quick introduction, I think we'll have a good debate in a few minutes. Thank you. Thank you, Marie.

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