The World Border Security Congress (WBSC), the leading annual gathering of the global border security community, took place in Vienna on April 14th. On the sidelines of the congress, SafeTravellers hosted a dedicated workshop with live pilot demonstrations, marking the closure of the project’s first phase. It was the third time SafeTravellers participated in WBSC, following the 2024 and 2025 editions.
WBSC is where the border management community comes together: border authorities, transport operators, law enforcement agencies, policymakers, and technology developers from across Europe and beyond. For a project like SafeTravellers, which has spent nearly three years researching, developing and testing technologies in real border environments, this is exactly the right audience at exactly the right moment. In fact, it was an ideal occasion to close the first phase of pilot demonstrations, laying the groundwork for the launch of the project’s next phase.
The workshop was made possible by the European Association of Airport and Seaport Police (EAASP), SafeTravellers’ pilot coordinator and a long-standing WBSC partner. Thanks to EAASP’s standing within the congress, SafeTravellers also secured a slot at the WBSC main plenary, a separate session reaching approximately 450 participants from over 60 countries, to present the project and its preliminary results.
Around 50 professionals joined the SafeTravellers workshop: border guards, police officers, policy representatives from across the EU, and participants from Africa, Asia and the United States. After an introduction by Carolina Marques (INOV, Project Coordinator) and Willem Mudde (VP Aviation, EAASP), the floor opened to five live demonstrations of the technologies being developed by SafeTravellers – the ID Wallet, biometric fraud and morphing detection, identity attack preention tools – alongside real pilot data to discuss with practitioners and end users.
Joe Palmer and Jonathan Ellis from iProov showed the SafeTravellers ID Wallet in action, Angelina Katsifaraki from Netcompany presented the European MultiBiometrics DataSpace (EMBDS) and its innovative technologies, Marina Pouet from IDEMIA Public Security France demonstrated ID document fraud detection, and David Fischinger from the Austrian Institute of Technology tackled morphing detection, how AI-assisted tools identify passports obtained through manipulated images. iProov colleagues closed with the demonstration of biometric attack prevention: how systems are protected against presentation, mimic and manipulation attacks.
Each demonstration was followed by open discussions, with direct, technically informed and operationally grounded questions: practitioners pushed on the ID Wallet’s resilience in offline and compromised conditions, raised AI-generated fraud as a daily operational reality, and pressed on exactly where the technology’s authority ends and the officer’s begins. On that last point, SafeTravellers is unambiguous: the officer is always the final decision-maker, as the system supports human judgement, it does not replace it.
Data governance and privacy were also discussed, and this gave the chance to SafeTravellers to confirm that a dedicated ethics and legal workstream runs alongside the technical development and that ethical and privacy issues are always taken into account. All the feedback gathered, revealing the challenges, the edge cases, and the operational concerns of stakeholders involved will be carefully taken into consideration as the project moves into its final phase.
SafeTravellers railway pilot scenario, led by the International Union of Railways (UIC), is the first to move into the full pilot demonstration and validation phase, with the demonstration day taking place on 11 June at UIC headquarters in Paris. The session will bring the full end-to-end process to a wider and selected audience, from traveller Pre-enrolment and Digital Travel Credential creation to biometric checks and the border guard’s decision interface demonstration, where real officers and volunteer travellers will participate in a simulated train environment.
The other pilot scenarios will follow in the coming months. More details on each to be shared soon.
Follow SafeTravellers on LinkedIn to stay up to date.
SafeTravellers at WBSC 2026: results, demonstrations and a community ready for what comes next
