Estonia Has Become A Role Model For Building Digital ID Wallets, Passports, And Digitalization Of All State Documents

The following report is by Biometric Update:

Erika Piirmets has been a digital citizen since she was a child. When she started primary school in Estonia in the late 1990s, her class switched from paper to digital diaries. In high school, she had her first encounter with the digital state when she enrolled for national exams online. She has never signed a physical work contract nor seen a paper tax declaration form and she casts her votes during elections electronically.

Estonia is now home to thousands of citizens who consider digital as the default. The Baltic state of 1.3 million people has become a role model for the digitalization of state services across the world.

But the country doesn’t plan to stop there, according to Piirmets, who now works as a Digital Transformation Adviser for the country’s e-government agency eEstonia. Its government is currently working on new digital identity mobile apps and services, including the country’s answer to the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI), the EU’s attempt to bring identity authentication to each citizen on the continent.

“The probability that people will not use electronic identity is quite low because we’re such a mature digital government,” Piirmets tells Biometric Update.

Estonia’s rapid success in digitalization is due to the early introduction of electronic ID cards in the early 2000s. The country made a political decision to make them mandatory to achieve a critical uptake of eIDs at a time when there were no digital services that could draw in people. Today, the country allows its citizens to perform almost any government service online – one last thing that Estonians cannot do online is divorce but this will change by the end of 2024.

Meanwhile, the government has developed authentication methods on top of eID, including SIM-card-based Mobile ID and Smart-ID, a private application issued by SK ID Solution that functions on a pre-verified device. In 2014, the country also incorporated an e-residency for non-citizens of Estonia into its digital identity system.

Estonia’s digital ID ecosystem is about to get even more options. Last year, the country attempted to launch a native wallet app called mRiik gathering government services. The app was created in collaboration with Ukraine using their experience in creating its e-government system Diia, which relies on a version of the Estonian distributed interoperability system X-Road.

Due to incompatibility issues and legal hurdles, mRiik was abandoned but the state is working on a new app that should see the light of day this summer. Its name is still unknown…