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Cybercrime is increasingly commonplace—modern bank identifiers are no longer enough to ensure your safety. Hightrust.id offers reliable digital identification protection.

History of electronic identification in Finland

In Finland, bank identifiers have been used for electronic identification since the late 1990s; they have been an officially approved electronic identification method since 1999. The Mobile certificate, which works on the SIM card of your mobile phone, was introduced in 2011. It offered a brand new way to identify yourself without a separate app or device. Both the above-mentioned identification methods are important tools for the use of electronic services in Finland.

Consequently, no service providers have been added to the register of identification service providers of the National Cyber Security Centre of the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency, Traficom, since 2011—until hightrust.id was approved and added to it in December 2023.

Development of regulation

The Electronic Signatures Directive (1999/93/EC) created a legal framework for electronic signatures. However, it was mainly focused on their legal status without covering electronic identification to any great extent.

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Current situation with electronic identification

In Finland, the use of bank identifiers as a strong identification method is unusually common. Approximately 90% of all identifications are based on a bank identifier. In addition to banks, they are used for logging into insurance companies as well as the services of government authorities, including Kela, the Finnish Tax Administration, and MyKanta.


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Future of electronic identification—high trust level digital wallets

The role of digital wallets in electronic identification is constantly growing. They offer a quick, flexible, and user-friendly way to prove your identity. In the future, especially high trust level digital wallets will play an essential part, with electronic identification requiring increasingly robust security features, factoring in privacy protection, and legal reforms.

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Potential digital wallet use cases

Every citizen with an ID card issued after August 31, 2021 equipped with a citizen certificate may enable an electronic identification token based on their national core identity in a free digital wallet on their smartphone and carry out a strong electronic identification on the mobile device at the highest possible Level of Assurance (LoA – High).

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Topical articles

Finns’ trust in the security of digital services and devices has significantly decreased, with data breaches, scams, and the development of AI highlighting new challenges. Attempted financial scams have become more common and cyber criminals are increasingly phishing for bank details. We have compiled recent publications and articles from Finland and around the world shedding light on these current phenomena and offering insights on how you can protect yourself and prepare for these growing threats.

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Notices

Here, we will share topics on which we want to comment as directly as possible.

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