Jarkko Levasma is the Government Chief Information Officer at the Ministry of Finance in Finland.
How does the Ministry of Finance in Finland perceive the evolving role of digital identity in advancing public services, particularly in the context of its involvement in UC1 (eGovernment services) and UC4 (Mobile Driving License) within the POTENTIAL consortium?
Ministry of Finance steers public sector information management, structural development, joint services and service provision in Finland. Digital identity is seen as a strong enabler to advance cross-border use of digital public services both for citizens and for businesses. Finland has a long tradition of developing digital society together with private-sector stakeholders, and Ministry of Finance envisions digital identity to be widely adopted in public and private sector digital services. Finally, Ministry of Finance strongly emphasises the need to ensure the highest level of security, and the adoption of privacy-preserving technologies when implementing digital identities.
Finland has been a trailblazer in digital governance, by focusing notably on creating ecosystems to provide better services. Could you share insights on how Finland envisions leveraging digital identity in fostering collaborative ecosystems and enhancing citizen services, considering the changing nature of digitization in both the public and private sectors?
Ministry of Finance is preparing to implement the digitalisation of life and business events, following the strategic guidance from Finnish Digital Compass. Life events are situations in which a natural person needs services, and business events are situations in which a legal person needs services. Digital identity offers an interoperable, secure, and privacy-preserving mechanism to enable digitalising some of the key life and business events for citizens and companies. Alongside the national eIDAS implementation, Finland also has a functioning Finnish Trust Network of strong electronic identification, and Ministry of Finance sees it important to ensure alignment and close co-operation between the existing eID infrastructure and the digital identity solutions of the future. Finally, Ministry of Finance has also promoted the interplay between cross-border eIDAS-driven digital identity ecosystems and a national digital identity trust ecosystem through the state aid of the Findy Trust Network. The goal is to ensure that national and cross-border digital identity ecosystems can co-exist and mutually benefit from each other, in order to provide additional value to citizens and businesses.
About that, Finland has embarked upon the ambitious Real-Time Economy project, aiming to create the conditions for a fully digitized economy by 2024. Could you elaborate on the project’s vision and objectives? How do you envision the role of digital identity within this project, and are there lessons or innovations from Finland’s experience that you believe could benefit to other Member States within the POTENTIAL consortium, especially in the context of national wallets’ interoperability ?
The vision of the Finnish Real-Time Economy project is to build a national digital ecosystem for business actors that would be compatible with similar systems cross-border. It would allow seamless, real-time, and secure transmission of orders, e-invoices, digital receipts, and business data between parties. Digital identity would ensure the ability for business actors to identify themselves in a cross-border setup, and thus increase trust between actors. Real-time economy project has also put strong emphasis on ensuring semantic interoperability of key business-related documents, which also promotes their adoption in digital identity wallets issued for legal persons. Finally, throughout the eIDAS regulation revision, Finland has kept in the forefront the need to take the special needs of companies and businesses into account when defining the capabilities and technical standards of the European Digital Identity Wallets. Ensuring wide adoption of digital identity among companies will offer the possibility to achieve benefits from the digital single market to its fullest potential.