The New South Wales state government has announced that driving licences will be moving to mobile devices by 2018, following similar deployments with other licences.NSW Minister of Finance and Services Dominic Perrottet made the announcement on Wednesday, saying that driving licences would follow a shift to mobile for recreational fishing, alcohol and gambling licences.”This technology will allow our citizens to display, apply, update and renew their licences using their smartphone, with real time information also available,” said Perrottet, reported the Sydney Morning Herald, adding that physical cards will continue to be available.”Customers are doing more and more transactions on their smartphones: from cafes to banks, businesses are offering customers the opportunity to access their services, loyalty programs and payment systems through smartphone apps,” he said when announcing the proposal. “There are currently over 123 different licence types and we issue over 2.8 million plastic cards each year, costing us tens of millions of dollars in printing.”The digital licence would store extra information about the holder that could be useful in an emergency, such as blood type and next-of-kin contact details.Meanwhile, the head of Service NSW, the government organisation which handles new licences, Glenn King, said law enforcement bodies from other states must be ready to accept the new technology.”If you take for example the Victorian police, they're looking for the card. And while we want to enable this from a technology perspective in NSW in terms of both having it on the device (and) also the checking device the Victorian police may not.” he told the Australian.Similar proposals are currently undergoing legislator debate in Iowa and Delaware in the United States.

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