Travellers line up at Changi Airport in Singapore. (Photo: AFP/VNA) Singapore (VNA) - Singapore residents and visitors leaving the country will be able to clear checkpoints without having to use their passports from 2024.
The information was announced by the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) at its annual workplan seminar held recently.
Travelers can clear immigration via QR code at land checkpoints if travelling by car, or the new contactless Automated Border Control System (ABCS) at passenger halls in airports, it noted.
The ICA said the manual counters at passenger halls at all checkpoints will be replaced by about 800 automated lanes using ABCS from the first quarter of 2024, The Straits Times reported.
The ABCS lanes will use biometrics for clearance. It is part of ICA’s new clearance concept (NCC), which was announced in 2019. The NCC transformation plan aims to provide faster and more secure immigration and customs clearance.
Special assistance lanes, which were rolled out in some passenger halls at Changi Airport in December last year and allowed travelers to conduct immigration self-clearance as a group, will be extended to other checkpoints from the end of this year.
For those traveling by car, ICA said it piloted the Automated Passenger In-Car Clearance System (Apics) in 2022 and about 94% of travelers were able to use it without assistance from officers.
The ICA is trialing the use of artificial intelligence to track anomalies in images of scanned baggage to help its staff better detect potential threats. In addition, the authority will also accelerate the transformation of border clearance services to facilitate the movement of people and goods./.
