Speaker: The Global ePassport and eVisa initiative Session: 12:25 Monday 04 April 2011

Presentation synopsis

eVisa - From the hardware to the software world

Visas have been around more or less since there werePassports. In fact, Visas are the very reason why there are Passport booklets at all, rather than Passport sheets or cards. While the physical Passport is now complemented by a logical counterpart that resides in an electronic component, Visas have gone another way. They started as a written notice, later a stamp, on the Passport. Today, many countries have ID3-sized visa stickers – the visa thus became a document within the document. It has been contemplated to include a chip in such stickers – ICAO 9303 originally included this idea – and limited pilot runs were executed. However, technical issues appeared.

The current trend seems to go towards replacing the physical visa with a purely logical one that resides in a database of the issuing country.

Starting off with a short history of the visa, the presentation will explore the status quo. What are the drivers that motivate to move the visa from one medium to the other: why would one convert it from a stamp to a sticker, and why from a stamp (or sticker) to a database entry? Is it possible to make general statements about what a visa will be in the mid- to long term?

Visas relate to international traffic, which today is most often air traffic. Look at the fact that in mid-2008, airline tickets were also converted from a document to a database entry. Let us do some out-of-the-box thinking: if this conversion is possible for tickets and for visa, could it also be done for Passports?
 

Biography
Mario Stoltz is a Product Manager at NXP. His position is in the eGovernment market sector of NXP’s business line identification. He joined NXP in 2007 from a previous position at Intel. Overall, he has more than ten years of product management / product marketing experience in the semiconductors industry. He graduated from Hamburg-Harburg Technical University with a MS in electrical engineering in 1997.