When we wrote the State of Biometrics Report last year, the hope for the world opening up centred on a vaccine being developed. A year on and the prevailing barrier to travel, business and community life is the ability to prove vaccination and testing status, quickly and reliably.

Looking back twenty years, we saw a similar period of disruption as enhanced security screening was implemented post 9/11, creating additional processes, inconvenience and delays for many important aspects of life. Although in recent months we’ve seen some innovation put into practice to ease administration and queues, overall the challenge of proving COVID status – whether that be to gain access to an event, to board a plane or cross a border – is again resulting in layered processes and delays, hindering business and community recovery.

This chapter includes developments in borders and travel, and verification for large events.

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