Finland To Experiment With Digital Passports That Save Time At Immigration

Tired of ransacking your bag for your passport at the airport? Well, better times are in sight as digital versions look set to take off for cross-border travel—with Finland being the first EU country to get on board. 
  
The plan calls for replacing the paper booklets with smartphone apps that store all of a person’s information, with a trial set to launch for travelers traveling from Finland to Croatia in the spring of 2023.
 

According to Euronews, Finnish Border Guard inspector Mikko Väisänen said that the nation is presently preparing to develop a prototype app for the European Commission to assess before the plan can take place. 

So, how will this new digital passport operate? Before even boarding, passengers will transfer their data to their destination, doing away with the wait at immigration checkpoints. The data will then be erased for safety reasons after they arrive. 
  
Travelers will still need to carry their physical passports with them when traveling during the trial period, though, just in case. However, if the initiative is successful, physical paper versions could be abolished. 

The program’s objective is to make traveling easier by reducing the need to wait in immigration lines. Once implemented, the transition could prove to be timesaving because identification could simply be authenticated through an app and photo—no more page-flipping and stamping!

The concept of digital passports is not new: Ukraine was actually the first country to legalize it back in 2021. However, they can only be used within the country as identification at places like banks and are not allowed for cross-border travel.

Since then, other countries such as South Korea have embarked on the digital documentation flight path, with the US further experimenting with a system that allows travelers to pass immigration using only face recognition technology without having to fish out your well-traveled paperback. 

[via Travel Tomorrow and Euronews, cover image via olezzo/Adobe Stock]