Questions/Answers

The ability to act on behalf of another legal entity in digital services does not only increase digital productivity, but also enables to bring those who are not able to use the digital services by themselves to the helm of digital services. Therefore, we introduce Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations, a service that enables Finnish government to provide digital services to all citizen’s and avoid societal exclusion in digital society. Suomi.fi-e-authorizations is free to use for both public and private sector service providers and end-users (citizens) in Finland, thus bridging the public-private gap in provisioning and governance of citizens’ services. Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations is highly used by citizens and creates both financial and social benefits for service providers as well as citizens themselves. With the creation and successful deployment of Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations Finland became “the first country in the world to allow people to electronically authorize another person to make important decisions for them” (European Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), 2019) The service is also built and shared as an open-source and can be utilized by other countries and organisations to provide similar e-Authorization-services.

Suomi.fi e-Authorizations is a service for reliable verification of a person’s or organization’s authorization, mandate or right to use digital services on behalf of another person or organi-zation regardless of time or place. The service provides mandates for all possible business cases and scenarios as well as their use cases, depending on which services the mandate is being used for. The service can be used for free in any digital service (public or private) in Finland.

SDG 8.2: During 2019 (January-November), nearly 16 million authorization checks have been made with the e-Authorization service, meaning the same number of users using digital service instead of other service channels (phone, paper post, service locations), thus cutting now manual work in service locations. SDG 10.2: The Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations service provides also key functions for public sector bodies in Finland to provide accessible digital services. Digital mandates can be granted in 2020 also by non-digital users in different service locations which makes it possible to widen the use on digital service to citizens who do not have access or knowledge to use digital services themselves at all (age, no knowledge, no internet etc.). SDG 17.17: Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations is one of the services creating the national infrastructure for digital services in Finland. The use of Suomi.fi-services is mandatory in Finland for public sector organization by law and free-of-cost to use by any private and thirs sector organsation as well as end-users.

Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations provides new ways for public and private sector to provide digital services also for situations which previously required travelling to service locations, thus cutting down the unnecessary use of cars, especially in the Finnish countryside where distances are far. Possibility to create digital person-to-person mandates have turned out to be especially useful inside families and friends. For example, elderly parents can now authorize their children, friends or other trusted persons to pick-up the prescription medicines from any Finnish pharmacy instead of having to travel themselves to pharmacies.

Before the development and deployment of Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations-service, it was not possible to act on behalf of other persons or organizations in digital services and authorize others to act on their behalf. The service supports all digital services and different kinf of use cases in Finland, thus removing the need to build separate solutions by public or private sector organisations. Althoug Finland is already highly digitalized, Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations has helped society to speed-up the digitizing progress even more.

Since there are no exact gender inequality issues in digital services in Finland, the service actually addresses more of the age inequality issues, by making it possible to provide digital mandates by elderly users who do not nescessary have the skills or internet-connection to use the digital services.

Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations is provided free-of-cost for all public, private and third sector organistions to be used as a part of their digital services. Using the Suomi.fi-e-Authorization service translates to significant cost savings for the service providers. The biggest savings are generated by the digitalization of the authority authentication process, which speeds up the verification of mandates, reduces the need for telephone calls and other manual work related to validating the authorizations. For example, The Social Insurance Institution of Finland (KELA) has estimated that getting citizens to mandate others to use their digital services instead of visiting service locations saves up to 6-8 euros / visit, thus creating major savings just by allowing the end-users to move to digital services also when the end-users cannot use digital services themselves. The end-users benefit quickly from the fast-growing number of digital services allowing them to mandate other citizens to use digital services on behalf of them. Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations is one of the key services enabling the Finnish entrepreneurs to be able to use all public services digitally by 2023, as drawn in current policy statement by Finnish Government.

Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations is one of the services creating the national infrastructure for digital services in Finland. Tee service was developed between 2014-2017 by Population Register Centre as a part of a National Architecture for digital services -programme. First deployments for production were made in October 2016 and ever since the service has been further developed and the use of service has been growing extremely fast by both service providers and end-users. There is an ongoing development project for 2018-2019 and also for 2020 to widen the properties and the use of the e-Authorizations even further. Suomi.fi e-Authorizations, as along with all the other Suomi.fi-services, is developed with scalable agile methods based on open-source technologies and adapting the principles of user-centric design and the needs of the service providers. Based on the law, Suomi.fi e-Authorizations has permanent financing for the production and development from the Ministry of Finance, Finland as a part of the annual budget for the Population Register Centre and the ministry provides guidance in the quarterly management team meetings (Suomi.fi strategic steering group) as well evaluates the benefits of the service.

The biggest obstacles have not been technical rather than legal. The development of the mandate register required a new legislation (The law on common administrative e-service support services 571/2016: https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/2016/20160571) adapted in the summer of 2016. The further development of new features requires periodic updates on the legislation - the process that is not as agile as the development of the service itself and therefore benefits are not reached as quickly as wanted. The concept of digital mandates has also required active marketing for the citizens of Finland as well as the end-user support provided by National Public Sector Info.

The common Suomi.fi-services, including especially e-Authorization service has been noticed both in National and European level as an important part of digitalization infrastructure in Finland. With the creation and successful deployment of Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations Finland became “the first country in the world to allow people to electronically authorize another person to make important decisions for them” (European Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI). Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations is being promoted as one of the re-usable building blocks for other member states to use and can be found in European Union’s Joinup-platform: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/solution/suomifi-e-authorizations/about.

There were no previous national e-authorizations benchmark services when the Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations service was developed. Suomi.fi-services general concept as a platform for the whole governent was though highly impacted the ways Estonia and Denmark had already been developing their digital society.

Not that we know so far. The service is open-source so it is possible that some parts of it has been used by other countries.

EU's new Single Digital Gateway-act requires member states to create a set of cross-border digital services fully digital by 2023. One enabler for delivering cross-border digital services is the possibility to act on behalf of a company and other citizens. Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations is the only European solution that has been nationally developed and deployed to full-fill all different mandate scenarios. During 2019, Population Register Centre has been involved in a joint pilot-project with European Commission and few other member states to define a common model and vocabulary for representation of mandates and powers which can lead to re-use of the Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations.

Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations has been developed as a part of of 7 different services creating the national architecture for digital services in Finland. Other services include national Suomi.fi-portal, Messages (digital post), national e-Identification service, service management-service, Finnish Service Catalogue and National Data Exchange Layed (based on X-road technology). Between 2014 and 2019 the Finnish Government has invested the total of 100 million euros to the development and deployment of all the Suomi.fi-services.

Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations is a law-based, mandatory service for public sector organistions in Finland, provided by Population Register Centre and it has permanent financing from the Ministry of Finance, Finland. It is widely used and developed jointly with the service providers who have integrated the service as a part of differens softwares and digital services.

Yes

Between 2014-2019 there have been several evaluations for all Suomi-fi-services by the Ministry of Finance (made by a company called Owal Group). Latest evaluation report will be finished in January 2020 and it covers years 2018-2019. There is also an ongoing cost-analysis evaluation (by KPMG) which will also finish in January 2020. E-authorizations was also evaluated internally by different specialist from Population Register Cenrtre in order to provide the basic mandatory information for this competition.

The information was gathered from the previous Owal Group evaluation reports (which are mainly based on service provider interviews and cost-analysis) and interviews of the business owners and key service providers (for example Finnish Tax Administration which is one of the biggest users of e-Authorizations in Finland).

The biggest findings were the possible cost-benefits that service-providers expect to get from Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations and the potential that the service creates by enabling digital person-to-person mandates that enable new end-users to start using digital services.

Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations service is a common - free-of-cost service for the whole public and private sector. The service is already in use in more than 80 digital services creating 2 million authorization queries per month. The citizens of Finland have already created nearly 4 milloin digital mandates enabling someone else to act on behalf of them (Finland has approximately 5,5 million citizens).

E-authorizations provides both registry based authorizations and mandate register based authorizations so service is been developed jointly especially with key base register officials (Population Register Centre, Finnish Patent and Registration Office and Legal Register Centre). Stakeholder workshops where the largest user organizations (goverment organizations, municipalities) can give directions and provide opinions on the development roadmap are organized regularly. There are different stake holder groups for private organisations, health-sector organisations, finance sector etc. Since mandate register is based on mandate themes that must be used in different digital services in the same way, these themes are defined in coordination with relevant stake holders (e.g. mandate themes for social- and health sector were nationally defined jointly with public and private and third sector organsations). The general feedback from the citizens is collected through national Public Service Info, national Suomi.fi-portal that has the user interfaces for citizens to create digital mandates and also through specific online citizens community (~300 citizens in all age groups and different roles nationwide) that has been recruited just for the development of all Suomi.fi-services.

Suomi.fi-e-Authorizations has accelerated the digitization of multiple public and private sector organizations and their services in Finland and proven to provide benefits for its citizens. E-authorizations is a unique solution in Europe (and even globally) both conceptually and within the legal framework and the use of centralized government funded service for both public and private sector in order to provide better digital services for Finnish citizens. The cost-benefits are yet to be shown in more detailed level when most of the public sector organizations start using e-authorizations in upcoming years. National legislation (comes to effect in 1st of January 2020) will make it mandatory to include a-authorizations to all public sector digital services where citizens could benefit from the possibility to mandate other citizens to act on behalf of them. In 2020-2021 there will still be more development to the service to e.g. enable the registry based acting on behalf of asscociations, provide functionalities for officials to create mandates on behalf of citizens and add eIDAS-federation to support cross-border use of e-Authorizations in European Union level.