Thales wins Sri Lanka’s biometric passport contract, Dominican taking bids

Thales and local partner Just in Time Technologies (JITT) have been awarded the contract to supply Sri Lanka’s biometric passports, which are planned for a rollout next year.

The first batch of 100,000 chip-based passports are scheduled for delivery by Thales by July 2025, with an agreement to supply one million passports annually over five years, reports Daily FT. A previous government statement suggested the first biometric passports would be ready for issuance in January.

The Ministry of Public Security will submit a cabinet paper to procure the co-developed public key infrastructure and propose personalizing passports using their system on a fee-per-passport basis. This change would incur additional fees for the new personalization services from the consortium.

The transition has brought new challenges to the Department of Immigration and Emigration of Sri Lanka, which has introduced a mandatory prior online registration for new passport applications to reduce congestion at the head office.

However, this new appointment system has decreased the daily issuance of the legacy machine-readable passports from 3,000 to 800, leading to a potential revenue loss of approximately US$13.2 million, according to the Sunday Times.

Thales has experience delivering identity documents with integrated biometric technology for over 150 government programs. This contract awarded by the government of Sri Lanka comes after Thales announced last year that it will provide biometric travel and digital ID to the Finnish police and chip-based passports to the United States.

Dominican Republic starts bidding for biometric passport

The Dominican Republic has started the bidding process for a contract to produce its biometric passports. Expressions of interest were collected by the government in May.

During this transition, the General Directorate of Passports has focused on reducing the time needed to obtain a passport. Whereas it previously took about three hours to obtain a passport, the process now requires about 30 minutes, as highlighted by Lorenzo David Ramírez Uribe, the director of Passports, in a blog post on Dominican Today.

The move towards biometric passports will serve the growing demand for travel documents in the country. More than 730,000 booklets were issued in 2023 alone. Additionally, biometric passports allow citizens to enter the United States under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP).

Article Topics

biometric passport  |  biometrics  |  digital ID  |  Dominican Republic  |  government purchasing  |  identity document  |  Sri Lanka  |  Thales Digital Identity and Security