Europe has set up the smart borders programme to modernise the management of external borders. Member states are confronted with ever-growing numbers of third-country nationals that travel to Europe.
Traditionally, border control is done at border control points, possibly with e-gates, or through mobile border agents. Many border-crossing points do not have the resources, both space and people, to handle large streams of third-country nationals to register them, obtain biometric data including fingerprints and evaluate the risks involved.
Self-service kiosks can alleviate this somewhat, but it can still take several minutes of processing leading to long queues, frustration and possibly aggression at border control points.
Fortunately, other use cases show how self-service can be done securely and reliably with self-service kiosks, using mobile technology.
In the EES and ETIAS regulations, self-service systems are explicitly mentioned and advocated. This mobile technology can be seen as a form of self-service technology, as are kiosks. From a legal perspective, there are, to the best of our knowledge, no obstacles to using mobile technology.
In this whitepaper, we explain how the technology works in general and how it can be applied in the context of smart borders. We illustrate this with proven use cases.