The global airport industry increasingly looking to IT solutions to help drive and facilitate growth, with innovative technologies like biometrics being key to those efforts, suggests a new Frost & Sullivan report.

Entitled “Digital Transformation in Airports”, the report predicts that by 2023, airport IT spending will reach $4.63 billion, driven largely by growth in passenger traffic and constraints on capacity. Traditional infrastructure growth can’t keep pace, particularly in Europe, so administrators are looking to technological solutions to improve efficiency; meanwhile in the APAC region, many airports are seeking to enhance their brands with exciting new technologies. And the top technologies among those solutions are biometrics, blockchain, data analytics, and artificial intelligence, according to Frost & Sullivan’s analysis.

Many of these solutions are already coming into plain view, especially biometrics. In the US, airports are embracing biometric passenger screening in tandem with border authorities seeking to enhance security, while in Europe and the UK airports are exploring it more proactively, with Gatwick Airport offering a recent example in its announcement of an end-to-end biometric passenger processing system. Singapore’s Changi Airport, meanwhile, has emphasized its technological sophistication in its introduction of biometric passenger screening. And the leadership of the World Travel & Tourism Council has lately emerged as an outspoken proponent of biometric technologies as a means of facilitating otherwise unmanageable growth trends.

This all presents further opportunities for players in IT and digital security, with Frost & Sullivan analyst Renjit Benjamin explaining in a report summary that “[a]s airports transition to a data-driven infrastructure, there will be considerable investment in data analytics, storage, and security products and services.” That suggests biometric tech will increasingly be used not only for passenger processing but for airport data security as well.

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