Tackling a growing challenge for Europe

The number of people crossing Schengen borders has been rising steadily for over a decade, driven above all by leisure travel. Building bigger airports, ports or land crossings is not only costly but also unsustainable, while longer queues would hurt the economy and frustrate both travellers and border guards. What Europe needs is a new way of crossing borders; faster, smoother, and still fully secure.

CarMen: biometrics on the move

This is the ambition behind CarMen, an EU-funded project that brings together 15 partners across six countries, including ISEN YNCREA (FR), the Home Office (UK), the French Ministry of Interior (FR), Center for Security Studies/KEMEA (GR), Hochschule Darmstadt (DE), CLR Labs (FR), Idiap Research Institute (CH), Thales (FR), Notitia (HR), CIVIPOL (FR) and Brittany Ferries (FR). CarMen will explore how to make border checks work in real life with biometrics on the move; from pedestrians to cars, coaches and trucks. It will also demonstrate the benefits of Digital Travel Credentials (DTCs) and integrate behaviour analysis to detect anomalies, ensuring that speed never comes at the expense of trust.

iDAKTO’s contribution: Enabling DTCs with iDCluster®

At iDAKTO, we are contributing as technology provider with our iDCluster® platform at the core of this effort. Fully aligned with international standards such as OpenID4VCI/OpenID4VP and ISO/IEC 18013-7, iDCluster® enables secure provisioning of DTCs into mobile applications and ensures trusted data exchanges at scale. Built on a micro-services architecture and deployable on private or public clouds, it combines flexibility with security by design, while guaranteeing GDPR compliance and giving users control over their personal data.

Impact for the industry and travellers

The impact is twofold. For the industry, CarMen offers a scalable, interoperable path to handle ever-growing traveller flows without costly infrastructure expansion, while reinforcing fraud protection. For users, it means shorter waits, a document-free journey, and the reassurance that privacy and consent are respected at every step.

Towards seamless and trusted travel

Set to run until 2027, with final trials at the port of Le Havre, CarMen will bring this new generation of border management into practice, demonstrating that smoother crossings and stronger security can go hand in hand. By joining the project, iDAKTO is making trusted digital identity the key enabler of tomorrow’s travel experience.

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