iBorders BioThenticate

Increasing security while easing passenger flow

Border management agencies need to quickly and accurately confirm that travelers are who they claim to be. By automating identity checks, governments can prevent the entry and exit of illicit travelers intent on using fake identities to commit trans-border crime, while at the same time facilitating a smoother and faster border crossing for ordinary travelers, who are key to growing commerce and tourism.

Today, identity verification at airports is often a manual process involving multiple redundant checks. Governments check passports at the border, airlines and security authorities also verify passengers by comparing identity documents with reservation details or boarding passes. As traveler numbers continue to increase the pressure on manpower, physical infrastructure and budget constraints is increasingly a challenge - manual checks are no longer a viable option to prevent the fraudulent use of identity documents. In addition, greater confidence in the identity of each passenger is key to the expansion of end-to-end self-service processes that are necessary to improve passenger flow throughout the airport, including at the border.

SITA iBorders BioThenticate solves these challenges by integrating biometric identity checks into each step of the passenger journey, including check-in, bag drop, security screening, boarding and critically, at the air border.

 

Overview

SITA iBorders BioThenticate uses travelers' unique biometric characteristics such as fingerprints, face images and iris to accurately identify each individual. The results are automated, repeatable, highly reliable and cost-effective.

iBorders BioThenticate helps governments ease congestion and resource constraints at immigration and customs, while simultaneously improving security and reducing document fraud. iBorders BioThenticate can verify each passenger's identity at each step in the journey. This allows for the expansion of secure self-service, lower costs, and a faster, hassle-free experience for travellers.

iBorders BioThenticate functions as the brain of the identity management system at the airport. It ensures integrated security through identity checks, which when combined with an up-to-date passenger risk assessment, facilitates a seamless passenger journey that maximizes process improvements through self-service.

iBorders is unique in supporting a converged approach where risk-assessment using airline-provided passenger data can be combined with reliable identity checks using biometrics to fully automate the border management and wider airport processes.

Benefits

SITA iBorders BioThenticate provides the following benefits:

  • Prevents document fraud by authenticating a person's identity
  • Focuses resources on individuals of concern, while easing flow of low-risk travellers
  • Technology and biometric modality agnostic: supports face, finger and iris biometric technology from multiple vendors, using industry standards, which allows SITA's customers to use the best and most cost-effective technology that meets their requirements
  • Ease of integration with existing legacy processes and systems, operated by border management agencies, airlines and airports
  • Fast, efficient implementation
  • Uses the latest technologies to implement a framework capable of supporting an unlimited range of customer requirements, providing high flexibility, scalability and performance

Benefits for airports:

  • Secure the airport using biometric access control, while processing passengers faster and more accurately
  • Faster self-service processes means increased capacity and revenue potential through more passenger dwell time in concession areas, and by offering value-added services targeted at frequent airport users

Benefits for airlines:

  • Reduced costs through the adoption of industry best practices for end-to-end secure self service
  • Provide differentiated service to premium passengers who are identified using their biometric
  • Reduce fines and costs associated with handling improperly documented passengers

Features

SITA iBorders BioThenticate includes the following features:

  • Enrollment, including capture and vetting of multi-modal biometric and biographic data from Machine Readable Travel Documents (MRTDs) on a wide variety of platforms such as workstations, mobile devices and kiosks
  • Issuance and management of biometric credentials, such as smart cards, for enrolled users
  • Verification of live biometric data against enrolled data on mobile and fixed devices, such as kiosks, hand-held devices and physical gates
  • Scalable management and matching of biometric identities
  • Centralized management and administration functionality, including audit and reporting
  • Standards based interfaces and biometric data management
  • High security architecture ensures data privacy

With iBorders BioThenticate, SITA combines a "commercial off the shelf" framework with our vast experience as the leading systems integrator at airports to facilitate and accelerate implementation. BioThenticate can be deployed on workstations, kiosks, hand-held devices and automated gates. The system is fully scalable up to large multi-airport implementations.

When combined with SITA iBorders AdvancedManagement, SITA iBorders BioThenticate supports the convergence of biometric identity management and risk assessment of passenger biographic data in a single, seamless solution framework for border management.