Verifly’s stop-gap solution

Though an international set of standards have not yet been agreed, companies and apps are already filling the gap. Verifly is one such example. The idea is that it’s a digital wallet for all of your Covid credentials, storing vaccine records and test results in one place to streamline the check-in process. It’s currently being used by British Airways, Virgin, American and several other airlines.

“It was a nightmare for the airlines to comply with all of the travel form requirements,” said Bourke. He explains how the airlines face a myriad of different rules for different countries, with passengers needing to declare different information at different points. His company’s app aims to bring everything together.

For some places, such as the UK and the EU, Verifly hooks directly into health systems using APIs, meaning that vaccine status can be automatically checked. But the complexity of the testing system means that there’s no central database of tests.

“There are 20,000 different providers of testing facilities, fronting labs, providing the

PDF reports in their own format,” said Bourke. He describes how Verifly uses API access with some providers, but most simply supply a PDF containing the results. So Verifly has been built to use AI and machine learning to read PDFs and pick out all of the expected fields, such as date of birth, the type of test and so on. And if the AI fails? Documents are automatically sent to a human to look over, a process that he says takes an average of five minutes.

At the heart of the app is a rules engine similar to what has been proposed above, and the company has configured it to match the travel rules for the countries it operates in. At the time of writing, Verifly is being used by 27,000 people every day, perhaps showing how it could be done on a wider scale in the future.