Managing the airside pass application process online | IDGateway

Who are IDGateway?

IDGateway are the market leaders in airport ID centre and ID pass application and management solutions. IDGateway uniquely transforms airport ID centre, airport security processes and pass management, by bringing them online into a dynamic online portal.

Managing the entire airside pass application process online, helps mitigate the insider threat, reduce processing time, and decrease rejected applications.  The system highlights profiles of interest and carries out both random and directed automated verification checks, to ensure maximum quality and enhanced security.

Using the platform also allows airports to automate some aspects of the process and remove the need for visits to their ID centres, putting more of the functionality as a self-service tool. Consequently, it is significantly more efficient compared with the paper-based application process employed by most airports.

How does this solution solve current issues specific to the airport industry?

The existing paper process and its associated regulatory requirements can be complex and difficult to understand. This in turn can lead to high rejection rates and ID Centre staff focusing on transactional compliance issues, such as the number of days between employments not exceeding 28 days rather than the suitability and risk around whether to grant the individual access to the critical part of an airport.

IDGateway removes this burden by carefully guiding the sponsoring organisation through each application, preventing non-compliance and dynamically indicating the requirements based on the information provided. This results in significantly higher calibre and more compliant submissions being made first time. Our validation algorithms can also help ID centre teams to spot fraudulent applications and to identify poor performing sponsors such that they can be better educated in the future.

What do you see as the airport industry’s biggest challenge at present?

The insider threat, where a member of staff can pose a security risk, is ever present. We urge all airports to adopt extra vigilance as the traditional paper-based system for processing applications remains vulnerable. Comprehensive security checks and audit capability on new and existing airport staff, needs to be a rigorous process and yet this is too often perceived as an imposition and a barrier to getting employees working. 

Assisting employers in understanding what background checking information is required and assisting them with maintaining compliance when applying for an ‘airside pass’ is a significant part of getting them to maintain diligence in the process.  The same applies to airport ID centres. All too often they are swamped by long queues at their door and volumes of poor quality applications which drain resources and diminish their ability to dig deeper into each applicant’s profile.  

If we are having this conversation in a year’s time, what do you hope to have changed?

Currently there is very little information to assist ID centres. We hope that the ongoing development of our validation layer within IDGateway, which links to external data sources and can automatically read and assess ID documents, will help to spot fraudulent applications.  We also hope to be able to provide a solution which will allow a better collaboration and sharing of risk information between ID centres to help create a shared resource between all airports.  We are also working with the regulator to try and develop technologies to further facilitate this.

What does the future hold for IDGateway?

We have just gone live with our new “smaller airports” product at Guernsey and Alderney airports.  This is a fully featured version of IDGateway but adapted and priced for airports of less than five million passengers.  The benefit of this product is that it enables smaller airports, who may not have the budget for our bespoke IDGateway platform, to be able to reap the benefits of an off the shelf online pass application process.  We are also starting to engage with airports outside of the UK and would like to push beyond aviation into areas such as military and other national infrastructure type organisations.