Estonia, EU – Baltic States, Financial Services, Good for Business, Innovations, Internet, Technology

The institute that is aimed at making data exchanges between the two countries significantly more effective will be headquartered in Tallinn.

The agreement on the establishment of the nonprofit association was signed by Estonia's Minister of Entrepreneurship and Information Technology Urve Palo and Anna-Maija Karjalainen, deputy secretary general of the Finnish Ministry of Finance, spokespeople for the Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications said.

Cooperation with Finland demonstrates also to the other EU member states that exchange of information between different countries is accomplishable, Palo said in a press release. "Estonia and Finland have been successfully working together in the field of ICT, exchanged data across the border and made preparations for developing a common X-Road already for a long time."

"Where the ICT success story of Estonia got its start from us adopting the Finns' ID card, now it is the turn of Finns to speed up the development of e-services by means of X-Road. With this we are making a long step forward in common development of X-Road and cross-border exchange of data," Palo said.

Cross-border cooperation will make developing X-Road cheaper for Estonia in the future, as NIIS will be financed from the budgets of both countries. The size of the membership fee for 2017 has been agreed to be 920,500 euros.

The purpose of the new institution is to ensure the quality and sustainability of the e-government infrastructure and functioning of international cooperation. X-Road is one of the most important mainstays of e-government in Estonia, whose correct and sustainable operation ensures the functioning of the national information system.

About 1,000 institutions in Estonia exchange data via X-Road and one of the visible outputs of it is the data that can be accessed via the eesti.ee portal.