Friday, January 29, 2016

Estonia's plan for anyone to be a citizen, digitally: Here's why thousands are signing up

With crowds of new e-citizens and hundreds of new companies, Estonia's e-residency project has exceeded expectations in its first year.

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                                                 An Estonian smart ID card.

One year into its e-residency plan to offer people who are not Estonian citizens or residents a digital identity, the project's head, Kaspar Korjus, is quietly satisfied with the results.

"Already by May, we had attained the objective we had set for the whole year [of 2,000 e-residents]. In July, the government set a new, higher goal: to have 5,000 e-residency applications by the end of the year. As of today, 7,600 people from 121 countries have applied for e-residency and are using Estonian e-services, mostly for entrepreneurial purposes," he says.

E-residents have created 240 new companies and 530 entrepreneurs use e-residency to administer their companies.

"This means that we've outperformed our initial goals almost fourfold," he added.

Estonian e-residency is a transnational digital identity, available to anyone in the world interested in administering a location-independent business online.

E-residency is based on Estonian X-Road middleware and enables access to many of the secure digital services that the citizens of Estonia have been using daily for almost a decade.

It is possible to apply for e-residency online. If, after a careful background check, it is granted, a special smart ID card can be collected at one of the 38 Estonian foreign representations or the Estonian Police and Border Guard Board service points.

Future e-residents just have to present a valid passport and provide officials with some biometric data, such as fingerprints.

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