A comprehensive new report titled "Ensuring Trust: Transition to Digital Credentials for Mariners" has been released, indicating that the global maritime industry's dependence on paper documents and unrelated digital versions poses significant operational, security, and administrative risks.
According to the report, approximately 2.57 million mariners are employed on over 85,000 commercial vessels worldwide, and these professionals are still required to carry physical copies of their documents, weighing up to four kilograms. The report emphasizes that merely changing physical documents to unrelated electronic formats or digital portals cannot resolve the identity verification challenges in this industry. Instead, there is a need for a global, collaborative trust framework that provides high levels of security while not creating additional burdens for various stakeholders, especially mariners.
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Heavy Administrative Burden and Operational Delays
Based on key findings of this report, verifying a mariner's documents can take between one to two hours for personnel sourcing teams. A recent survey in the industry referenced in this report shows that the average time for preparing documents related to port calls is 191 minutes, and 64% of port calls still rely on paper documents or a combination of paper and digital.
Physical documents and maritime service records are highly susceptible to loss or damage. Replacing lost paper documents requires contacting multiple issuing authorities, during which time the mariner is unable to work, leading to disruptions in crew changes and delays in vessels.
Security and Privacy Issues
There are numerous educational institutions and national formats around the world that increasingly make visual inspection of documents unreliable. Forged or altered documents, as well as revoked or expired credentials still in circulation, continue to pose safety and compliance risks. Scanned copies and PDFs do not solve this issue; credentials must be linked to valid digital identities that can be independently verified.
Given the recent changes to the STCW Convention, which will come into effect in January 2025 and officially extends the "original" form to electronic formats, there is a pressing need to shift towards standardized and interoperable digital data exchange in the industry.
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