Restoring Trust In Travel: Creating A Globally Accepted Health Pass

Ajay Bhalla, President, Cyber & Intelligence, Mastercard

The first few months of 2021 have seen hopeful progress, as the world continues to right itself following the turbulence of last year. Government and business efforts to restart regional and global travel responsibly are eagerly anticipated and closely followed. 

The need to address how people move around safely is crucial – for our wellbeing, for jobs and for economies. A year without holidays, family visits or business trips has had a direct impact on global finances – in the first 10 months of 2020, restrictions on movement saw international tourist arrivals fall by 72% and the loss of $935 billion in export revenues. 

As a result, many governments around the world are contemplating and developing plans to restore regular travel. An authoritative, verified assurance that it is safe for a person to visit another country requires a system that can easily and reliably confirm a person’s health status – such as proof of vaccination or recent negative test result – as a condition of access. 

Currently, emerging solutions are incompatible with each other and do not connect the crucial domains of health, identity, government and travel effectively. A complete ecosystem approach to a global, interoperable health certification, operating within a framework of collaboration, is the only way forward. This is a complex problem to tackle, but we see digital identity playing an important role, thanks to its ability to verify a person’s identity immediately, safely, and securely, in both the digital and the physical world.

Mastercard, through its Digital Identity Services, has been at the centre of a number of important global initiatives and partnerships to help navigate the complex issues on the road to consensus in this area. Following successful trials at a number of UK airports, we are working closely with private and public sector partners such as the International Chamber of Commerce, the World Economic Forum, the Good Health Pass Collaborative and others. These efforts variously aim to establish an enabling environment for interoperable digital solutions and define the principles and standards frameworks that will help get the world back on its feet and jumpstart the global economic engine.

A significant evolution is the forthcoming publication of the Good Health Pass Collaborative’s blueprint for how progress can be made. It takes a closer look at the key areas that all stakeholders will need to come together on - including consistent user experience, exchange protocols, security, privacy and data protection - to create a genuinely interoperable solution.

The good news is these technical aspects are fully achievable using existing technology. Systems to verify and store a digital identity, giving the user total control over their data, can be adapted to include verified attributes such as vaccine or test status. Accessed on a smartphone or other personal device, apps to hold this information can overcome the difficulties and fraud risks of paper-based solutions and make it faster and easier for officials to verify an individual’s health status. 

Without global partnership to ensure a coherent approach to this challenge, we run the risk of exacerbating inequalities and entrenching restrictions with systems that do not talk to each other. If getting to go on a much-needed holiday abroad or conducting vital business face-to-face are not incentive enough to ensure collaboration and interoperability, building a better, more inclusive world certainly should be.