Air travel is stoking a much-needed but quiet revolution to do away with queues, paperwork, and repeated document checks. To make this happen, airports and airlines have to redesign the entire passenger journey around digital identities enabled by biometrics and interoperable standards.
NEC Corporation (NEC), a company leveraging decades of experience in telecommunications and cutting-edge technologies such as biometrics and AI, is very active about rolling this convenience out one airport at a time. From the get go, NEC’s Director of Global Aviation Takashi Nomura, also wanted to clarify, “I think all of us are now digital travellers.”
NEC has established itself as a global leader in biometric and recognition technologies, with decades of R&D spanning face, iris, fingerprint, palmprint, voice, and even more forward-looking capabilities like ear-acoustic authentication. Their face, fingerprint, and iris recognition technologies rank at the top of industry benchmarks for speed and accuracy.
More significantly, all these multi-modal capabilities underpin NEC’s own digital identity platforms, allowing organisations to verify individuals securely and seamlessly across a wide range of real-world environments, from public safety deployments to large-scale citizen services.
It is this very knowledge, expertise, and experience which is driving the company’s mission for seamless travel, a digital-enabled experience where a traveller’s journey begins on their smartphone at home, not at the airport kiosk, or counter.
Nomura reiterated that travel has to be “Truly Seamless”, highly secure, smart, swift, and streamlined. This “home to seat” vision signifies an experience that is for everyone and not just a niche digital traveller segment.
Decentralised ID and Verified Credentials – standards
The cornerstone of NEC’s next-generation travel vision is decentralised ID (DID) combined with verifiable credentials (VCs). These are open web standards defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): W3C sets the technical specifications for how DIDs and VCs work, while aviation bodies like International Air Transport Association (IATA) and Airports Council International (ACI) adopt and operationalise them in industry programmes, guidelines, and best practices.
In other words, W3C defines the language; IATA and ACI help airports and airlines speak it consistently.
Together, DIDs and VCs enable “self-sovereign” identity, where individuals can prove who they are and that their data is valid while sharing only the minimum necessary information through selective disclosure, in a secure and privacy-preserving way. In air travel, this becomes a powerful convenience that IATA and ACI – global trade associations for airlines and airport operators – recognise and promote.
The core idea around DID and VC is that control of a traveller’s personal data shifts back to the individual instead of sitting with airports or airlines. Its decentralised identity platform is built around a digital wallet app that stores credentials, an issuance system that governments or airlines use to issue trusted digital credentials, and the verification system that airports or airlines use to validate credentials at check-in or gate.
“Passenger numbers could triple over the next 15 to 20 years. How can current airports accommodate these numbers? The only solution is digital transformation.“
What NEC offers is a platform-first strategy that integrates hardware with an airport’s existing infrastructure in an agnostic way.
Nomura pointed out that NEC’s strength is in the backend matching system or biometrics platform that sits behind issuance and verification processes.
Solving the enrollment problem
Despite the promise of biometrics, one of the biggest obstacles to seamless travel is what Nomura calls “enrollment” – the initial step where a passenger’s identity, documents, and trip details are captured and verified. “That’s where the headaches always come,” he said.
Traditionally, enrollment has taken place entirely at the airport kiosk or counter: physical passport, printed documents, visas, and boarding passes are required on site for manual checks.. NEC’s approach is to move as much of that process upstream as possible, to the passenger’s own device, before they even leave home, and to rebuild enrollment around secure digital identity and biometrics.
Developments have been promising.
While decentralised identity is still emerging, NEC has already delivered token-based biometric journeys using a combination of face, passport, and boarding pass. The traveller need only to enroll once and subsequent touch-points can be entirely face-based.
Nomura explained, “What we do is that we connect all the boarding information with the face and the passport, and then upon checking (in) you will have what we call a token. As long as you have a (face-based) token, you can go through all the check points, because it’s already verified and connected with the passport and the boarding pass.
“What we have done is completely seamless without the traveller needing to show documents.”
This token-based approach is already in use in airports across the globe, particularly in one Asian market, where it has achieved a 98-percent enrollment rate.
The practical gains
Another critical focus is developing interoperability between multiple airports and airlines, so that credentials and tokens created in one part of the world can be reliably used in another.
The potential for convenience and time-savings is significant – 67-percent faster processing for overall departure flow and 94-percent faster security checks. These gains translate into more choice for passengers: those who enjoy lingering in airports get more dwell time for shopping and dining, while those who prefer to arrive later can still move quickly with peace of mind to their departure gate.
“This solution can benefit any kind of traveller,” Nomura pointed out.
Digital transformation and standards for mass traction
The pressure for collaboration is growing, driven by post-COVID traffic rebounds and rapid passenger growth in Asia. The global aviation lead observed, “Passenger numbers could triple over the next 15 to 20 years. How can current airports accommodate these numbers? The only solution is digital transformation.”
Specifically, this means using digital technologies to digitise identity, automate routine checks, and standardise how trust in a traveller’s identity can move with them.
As standards mature and adoption spreads, the vision of walking from home to gate – and beyond – without friction, paper or repeated checks is coming into focus.
NEC’s message to airlines, airports and governments in the region is clear: it wants to be more than a technology vendor.
Nomura concluded, “We are quite confident that we can deliver our solutions. We’re not just a solution provider, but looking to be a strategic partner to co-design this solution together.”