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Technology is Reshaping Everything from Customs to Finance. Here's How You Stay Ahead
Innovation is about turning new or creative ideas into real world solutions that solve problems, meet needs, improve processes or drive the growth of businesses.
In NEC Asia Pacific, the organization that spearheads this is the NEC Laboratories Asia Pacific (NLAP), formerly known as NEC Laboratories Singapore (NLS). NLAP supports NEC’s business, especially in the ASEAN region, by looking into customers’ problems and needs and co-creating the new AI solutions needed through collaborations with various technology partners, such as the other labs and product divisions in NEC. The process involves iterations of prototyping and trials with customers to evaluate and validate the effectiveness of the solutions in customers’ environment.
Since establishment in 2013, NLAP has created solutions for customers in various domains, including Public Safety, Smart Mobility, Smart Manufacturing, and Smart Healthcare.
Travel and Border Control
International tourist arrivals 
grew by 4% in 2025, according to the UN’s World Tourism Barometer, and those numbers increase even further during the holidays and festive seasons like Chinese New Year.
This surge in travelers comes with the increased chance of delays at airport immigration and border crossings at land checkpoints. This is an area where NEC focuses on placing solutions that support the clearance of travelers as quickly and reliably as possible. Using biometrics technology like facial, fingerprint and, more recently, iris recognition, the identification process for travelers can be manless, touchless, and even seamless, allowing a frictionless travel experience and making it a win-win for both travelers and the immigration authority.
Solutions leveraging LiDAR technology are also deployed within airports, especially in sensitive areas where CCTV cameras are prohibited, to detect and track travelers anonymously to understand the human traffic flow patterns. This can provide useful information to other travelers through digital signage, such as the waiting time for various checkpoints. The information is also consumed by the airport authority to provide better situation awareness and to better optimize their manpower on the ground.
During the pandemic in 2020, NLAP was quick to combine thermal scanning with facial recognition to perform mass screening of travelers for fevers, and then to track those with elevated body temperature. The solution was deployed in multiple airports in the US to support the reopening of air travel, eliminating the need for staff to man the temperature scanning stations, which in turn minimized the exposure of the officers to the travelers.
Going forward, NLAP will be working on solutions to support the vision of a truly gateless and seamless travel experience, where travelers will walk to and from their gates without having to pause for identification. Officers will step in to check only on those who are not identified for any reason.
Travelers in vehicles crossing at land checkpoints can be identified reliably without having to disembark, to allow a smooth flow of traffic at the border, reducing the waiting time drastically. The result is lower operating costs, more efficient passenger processing, and happier travelers.
Smart & Secured Compound
In secured compounds such as military facilities, stepping up security often means more manpower. For example, when a visitor or contractor enters the compound for meetings or to carry out some work, it often means someone needs to escort them to and from the designated area. This can be manpower intensive, especially on days with many visitors.
As such, having an end-to-end access control and monitoring system can be the answer for customers who require high security but have limited manpower. Such a system would enable visitors to self-register, granting security access control via biometric authentication. Security can then continuously monitor the movement of visitors via CCTV cameras with advanced video analytics, providing situation awareness and alerts when anomalies are detected.
A manless security escort system uses a combination of biometrics, advanced video analytics, and LiDAR sensing technologies to track individuals within a secure environment, alerting the human operator if the visitor/contractor strays off a pre-determined path or engages in activity they should not.
The command center user interface provides visuals to track every visitor/contractor and generates alerts when anomalies are detected, providing tools to perform quick investigation for follow-up actions, saving significant resources while resulting in a less obtrusive experience for visitors.
Going forward, NLAP will be working on improving the solution’s reliability and cost effectiveness, while adding new capabilities like behavior and event recognition to support the vision of a truly automated and manless system.
Digital Finance
Banks, insurers, and other financial institutions often have large portfolios of products and identifying the right one for a specific customer’s requirements can be labor-intensive. For high value clients, that additional layer of customer service may make sense, but for retail banking, it can be both a cost and a potential barrier to sales, since customers may face a delay in getting the information or recommendation they require.
An AI Financial Advisor uses Large Language Models (LLMs) trained in the finance industry and with knowledge of the financial institution’s products and offerings to allow relationship managers to discuss a customer’s requirements using natural language and receive recommendations on the relevant types of plans. Crucially, the system provides targeted and customized solutions while saving time, enabling relationship managers to serve customers more efficiently.
In the Supply Chain domain, Supply Chain Financing (SCF) improves cash flow by leveraging the buyer's strong credit to give suppliers early payment on approved invoices at low rates, while buyers get extended payment terms, optimizing working capital for everyone. However, SCF systems are usually complex and have many processes that need human intervention such as risk assessment, document processing, and negotiations, making it manual and inefficient.
As such, NEC is introducing Agentic AI technology that can perceive, reason, plan, and act independently to achieve complex goals with minimal human oversight, making it capable of autonomous risk assessment, smart matching of financing options, negotiation and execution, real-time cash flow forecasting, automated document processing and continuous optimization.
These new capabilities enable CFOs and treasury teams to do more with less by delivering real-time insights, managing risks and compliance, achieving growth, and driving value creation.
All these technologies and solutions and more are on display at NEC’s Advanced Centre for Experimentation in Singapore, where customers can experience for themselves how we’re Creating What’s Ahead, as well as work with NEC’s experts to co-create solutions to solve specific problems.
This article was written in conjunction with Christopher Lam, Vice President and Head of NEC Laboratories Asia Pacific.
