John Wagner
Since its pilot launch in mid-2008, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Global Entry international trusted traveler program has enrolled about 650,000 travelers. CBP recently announced a reciprocal agreement with the United Kingdom, adding to existing deals with Canada, Mexico and the Netherlands, and seeks to expand the program to such other top frequent traveler destinations as Japan and South Korea. CBP executive director for admissibility and passenger programs John Wagner recently spoke with The Transnational's Lauren Darson about the current status of these agreements and other Global Entry updates. Wagner told The Transnationalthat Global Entry by the end of this summer would be a permanent program and that CBP intends to expand it to other airports.
What is the current status of reciprocity with the United Kingdom?
We are looking to launch a very limited pilot with the U.K. in the next month or so. It would be limited in the number of people that will be able to apply from the United Kingdom based on the workload that the British government can handle. The basis of the arrangement is such that each country does background checks on the applicants against the negotiated standard and the negotiated threshold for disqualification. If you are a British citizen, you will be vetted by the British government, you will apply with U.S. Global Entry and you will get vetted and interviewed by the United States. [U.S. vetting] would be done stateside, at least the collection of biometrics and the interview. Right now, they are independent programs. We will be working with the U.K. government to identify people who will give us a good pilot test basis. We will be working closely with the airlines that fly between the U.S. and the U.K. to identify some of their frequent flyers. We will very carefully work through a pilot phase before we open it up to a broader audience. The airlines have been very supportive of the Global Entry program. A lot of U.S. carriers have done direct marketing to their frequent flyers. They have been putting it on their websites, they have been showing some video clips on planes and they have been putting information in the inflight magazines. We have also been taking ads out in those, and they have been really helpful in getting the information to their frequent flyers.
What is the status of reciprocity with Germany?
We are still in discussions with them as to how a pilot could operate between the U.S. and Germany. It's just not ready to launch yet. There are a lot of data privacy issues and data protection issues on the German side that we are trying to work through.
Are there any updates on the CBP initiative to register frequent travelers onsite at corporate headquarters?
We continue to do that. If a group of people can get together in a company and get their applications in, if it's something that is workload- and travel-permitting, we will send an officer or a couple of officers to their work site to do the interviews and the fingerprint collection. It is convenient for the company and the applicant, and it allows us to free up that congestion at the airport. We recognize that people probably don't want to do this in conjunction with a flight, especially if they are just coming off a trip and they want to get home quickly. It does make sense for us to do it outside of the airport environment. It's just a resource issue for us to keep up with them, but we are doing as many of them that we can. I would say that a few hundred have done this.
How do you decide with which countries to partner?
It's a variety of factors. It's the number of frequent travelers coming from those countries to the U.S.—certainly Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and Korea are the top countries that people come from as far as the number of frequent travelers goes. Then we look at: Do they have the systems in place to do the types of background checks that we would require? Do their border control authorities have access to the databases to do the types of checks? Criminal records, customs violations, national security issues, and are they willing to check their own citizens and potentially disqualify them from joining the U.S. program? Do they have a program that they would then open up access to U.S. citizens participating in Global Entry into their program? In the case of the Netherlands, they opened their program, called Privium, to U.S. applicants on the basis that they're given Global Entry membership. In Mexico, they are currently building their program. We just signed an agreement recently with Korea. We are in the process of designing and building what that process would look like. We would like to have that up and running by the end of the year. We've had very good talks with Japan and then talks with a few other countries as well--Singapore, France and a couple other countries. Korea and Japan run programs that generally U.S. citizens cannot participate in at this point, but we will broker that deal through these types of discussions.
Are there any process improvements in the pipeline for Global Entry?
We want to design the most efficient process possible that does not lessen or diminish our security or border processing requirements. Using the kiosk, the transaction time takes about 35 to 40 seconds for a person to clear through, plus there is very little if any line for the person to wait on. We are getting a lot of really good feedback from people using it. There is the occasional problem from the IT end of things. We monitor the [kiosk] usage and their maintenance every single day. We want to make sure that we have enough kiosks that function so that the line at the kiosk isn't longer than the regular line. We are getting about 3,000 people a day now using the kiosks and of course that steadily increases as we do the enrollments. We have about 135 kiosks out there right now at the 20 airports; we are negotiating with a vendor right now on another purchase. We will be putting out a larger number of kiosks, probably this summer. The article originally was published in Business Travel News.