The Malaysian Insight

THE developers behind the Traveller app, which won the 2021 Apec digital prosperity award, are hoping for government approval to use the app to automate immigration lanes at airports in Apec countries.

“We are ready to go, but we need the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (which handles Apec matters) and the Ministry of Home Affairs (which handles immigration) to give us the green light,” Faisal Ariff, the former fund manager-turned-entrepreneur, told The Malaysian Insight.

“The exciting opportunity for us is automating the Apec immigration lanes, by combining the app with our autogate work.

“The lanes are still manual at airports around the region. Apec itself admitted in a 2014 report that the lanes need to be automated, and we’d love to do the work,” he added.

On November 9, the team was declared the winner of the annual award by New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta at the Apec ministerial meeting.

Mahuta said the winning team addressed this year’s Apec theme to “get people ready to move again”.

“The team prioritised the digital transformation of the tourism industry through the uptake of smart technologies and digital tools, with the goal of boosting safe and seamless travel to meet visitor demand,” Mahuta said.

Led by Faisal, the team consisted of Amjad Ali Alhaneesh, Sherman Peter and Nik Emir Rizan Sulaiman.

The app was designed to facilitate travelling amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We are very grateful and humbled to get the recognition. It’s our first ever award from an inter-governmental body and we are told it’s quite prestigious,” Faisal said about the victory.

“However, what is more important to us is being able to implement our work and put it to good use at airports for international tourists and business travellers to get through immigration quickly and safely.

“Our economy really needs this for a meaningful post-pandemic recovery as tourism is 15% of our GDP,” he added.

As such, he said, his team was hoping that the ministries would give them the opportunity to and realise that this could become a broader opportunity for Malaysia to build a regional service.

“This service will have to interface with domestic immigration systems of not just Malaysia but other Apec economies. It it is quite different from the current ongoing domestic immigration system revamp. Let’s see what happens,” he said.

App developed in just two weeks

Faisal said it took two weeks for the team to develop the app.

“It sounds short but we had seven years of experience to draw upon so we could incorporate things like facial recognition, optical character recognition and QR codes relatively quickly. The lockdown was of course very challenging, but we somehow made it work,” the founder of BorderPass said.

Founded in 2014, BorderPass built an autogate service that helped non-Malaysian tourists and business travellers to get through airport immigration in seconds.

It received the support of Teraju, Cradle, the Malaysian technology Development Corporation, Platcom Ventures, Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre, and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation’s national technology and innovation sandbox.

“We built the world’s first immigration autogate equipped with facial recognition and contactless fingerprinting, installed at KLIA2 in 2016, winning seven international technology, innovation, and industry awards. Most importantly, our users loved our service, saving 45 minutes to an hour of queuing time,” he said.

“We ran a very successful and popular free trial at the airport but unfortunately, the government asked us to cease operating at the airport after the 2018 election, even though we have no political links and won approvals purely on merit.

“We have been in limbo since, but the sandbox programme has been trying to get us reinstated with the Ministry of Home Affairs,” he added.

However, during the pandemic Ministry of International Trade and Industry officials told them about the Apec app challenge.

Apec’s theme this year is “Getting People Moving Again” and BorderPass has always been travel-focused, according to Faisal.

“Travel had clearly changed because of Covid-19 and we wanted to incorporate test and vaccination results into our travel process flow, so we thought we’d enter,” he said.

“We didn’t win the app challenge, but Apec awarded us its digital prosperity award instead, our eighth international award,” he added. – November 14, 2021.