Ana Sofia Mota is president of the Board of Directors in the Administrative Modernization Agency (AMA) in Portugal.
How does the Administrative Modernization Agency perceive the role of digital identity in advancing public services in Portugal, and how does this vision align with the objectives of the POTENTIAL project ?
Portugal began developing its digital identity system in 2007, aggregating in one card 5 different identification numbers and implementing digital certificates with its eID “Citizen Card”. Since then, the Portuguese government has continuously invested in its eID scheme by launching several secure and easy-to-use mechanisms.
In 2014, we launched the Digital Mobile Key (CMD), a mobile solution that allows both secure authentication in websites and the digital signature of documents, spreading its usage to the private sector, and in 2018 the eID features were extended to include professional attributes (Professional Attributes Certification System/SCAP).
It’s worth noting that both the Citizen Card and the Digital Mobile Key are fully compliant with the EU eIDAS Regulation, with a “high” Level of Assurance, providing citizens and businesses with secure and convenient eID mechanisms.
More recently, in 2019, Portugal launched the ID.gov mobile application that allows citizens to access, save and share their personal documents’ data at any time, with full legal validity. This digital wallet already encompasses 12 documents, including the Citizen Card, the driving license, the car property document (single car document) and the ADSE card (health subsystem of public servants), and other cards are being added. ID.gov is based on the Digital Mobile Key electronic authentication and uses the national interoperability platform to retrieve the data from the relevant base registries, providing a secure, reliable and transparent service to users.
Finally, Autenticacao.gov is the central platform that brings together the various national electronic authentication and signature solutions available to citizens and businesses, also providing them with complete information about the potential of these solutions.
Could you explain how the solutions within Portugal’s eID ecosystem, particularly those related to POTENTIAL’s focus areas, have contributed to enhancing the citizen experience, and placing him at the forefront of digital interactions ?
The Portuguese eID ecosystem has consistently grown throughout the years and subscriptions to the Digital Mobile Key have been steadily increasing, notably since private entities started using it as the preferred identity provider. The number of CMD authentications in national portals and websites doubled from roughly 3 million in 2018 to 7,5 million in 2019 and afterward, the COVID-19 pandemic brought even higher usage of digital identity, offering citizens the possibility to easily access public services digitally.
Reliable, easy-to-use digital services go hand-in-hand with secure and trustworthy eID mechanisms, and recent years made clear the fundamental role they play in any modern society, as proven by a new surge in authentications that rose from the referred 7,5 million to over 22 million in 2023, but also from the number of services that nowadays use the Portuguese eID ecosystem, which currently amounts to 397, ranging from central and local Government to private sector services.
Given POTENTIAL’s emphasis on the interoperability of national wallets in Europe, could you highlight specific contributions or innovations from Portugal’s national solutions that you believe could be effectively applied by other Member States within the POTENTIAL consortium?
Launched in 2007, initially to support the Citizen Card project, the Interoperability Platform of the Public Administration (iAP) is a service-oriented central platform that aims to make a shared tool available to all public administrations that allows multichannel services for citizens and enterprises.
The iAP comprises four independent services:
- the ‘Integration Platform’ provides a secure channel for the exchange of data between entities, allowing simple and integrated delivery of cross-cutting electronic services;
- the ‘Authentication Supplier’ allows authentication using the Citizen Card and the CMD in portals duly accredited and authorized for that purpose;
- the ‘Payments Platform’ enables the availability and integrated management of multiple payment methods for different channels; and
- the ‘SMS Gateway’ enables the sending and receiving of SMSs with the public administration bodies, thus enlarging the number of available contact channels for managing the relationship with citizens.
This central platform services, generates several benefits, namely total independence of the technology used, reduction of operational and investment costs, shortened times for implementation, reuse of services/data made available by other bodies/entities and integrated management of the different transversal electronic services.
iAP is guided by several principles, such as service integration, simplified identification, privacy and security, assurance of the stability of current information systems and shared sustainability of the platform among the several entities that use it.
As it has been used since 2007 in the context of Digital Identity, with a specific use case in recent years for the Portuguese eID wallet ID.gov and the growing number of identity cards that have been made digital in the platform in the last years, it represents a body of knowledge and experience that constitute an undeniable added value for the POTENTIAL consortium.