The objectives of the three pilot projects now running in Finland are:

Cross-Border Authentication Platform for Electronic Services: to achieve further cooperation between EU member states, via mutual recognition of their respective national eID scheme. Through technical interoperability achieved with electronic services, the ease-of-use and take up of these services will be improved across national borders. Finnish citizens can authenticate with their electronic ID card and use pilot services provided by Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Germany and Portugal.

Electronic Delivery: to make national eDelivery portals accessible for citizens of foreign countries using their national eIDs. Furthermore, this pilot aims to create a basic framework enabling countries and their public administrations to send documents to citizens of different countries directly through the citizen’s domestic eDelivery portal. Finnish citizens can authenticate with their electronic ID card and use pilot services provided by Austria, Estonia and Slovenia.

Change of Address: to develop a framework for an interoperable change of address service that allows foreign citizens (using foreign eID credentials) to notify all relevant entities of an address change, without changing processes currently in place in each member state. This is achieved by using the STORK defined interoperability layer to identify and authenticate the citizen’s eID and by defining two use cases for the service. Finland is providing the pilot service for uploading address declaration, which has been received from another member state. The Finnish change of address service is available for Finnish citizens living abroad and for foreign citizens of Estonia, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. Finnish citizens can authenticate with their electronic ID card and use pilot services provided by Estonia, Portugal, Slovenia and Sweden. Also access to Spanish services will be available soon.

Finland joined STORK at the beginning of 2010, and has since implemented the interoperability layer using STORK PEPS (Pan-European Proxy Service), national identification proxy service VETUMA and Finnish electronic ID card (Qualified Certificate) for authentication technology and qualified eSignature certificates for eID verification.

Finland introduced personal citizen eID cards in 1999 and so far about 350,000 have been issued to citizens.

For background information on STORK, visit the project website.