Estonia, Good for Business, Innovations, Internet, Markets and Companies, Technology

Deputy secretary general of the Estonian Ministry of Justice Viljar Peep said that hopefully already in the near future Estonian business operators will no longer have to file paper documents to the commercial register of Finland to prove their existence and right of representation.

"Estonia has taken the steps necessary for this on its part. The Estonian register also will check whether the data of the Finnish company is correct and the company exists. This reduces paperwork and improves security, as it is more difficult to commit fraud,"  Peep said. 

For the time being, only the persons engaging in the processing of commercial register data, who need the data for the performance of their work duties, have access to the data exchanged. Hence, the information will be used by the keepers of the register in the respective countries: the department of registers of the Tartu County Court in Estonia and the Patent and Registration Office in Finland. The data will not be forwarded or sold to third parties.

Siim Sikkut, deputy secretary general of the Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications and Estonia's chief IT official, said that preparations for the exchange of data over X-Road between Estonia and Finland have been underway in both countries already for several years.

"The data exchange between commercial registers that has got underway is the first major result of this work, whose aim has been integration of the digital services of Estonia and Finland," Sikkut said.

He said that, along the same lines, the two countries will be moving forward with exchanges and joint use of information about activity licenses, population register data, health information, and similar. 

In May 2016, the prime ministers of Estonia and Finland signed a joint declaration on launching data exchanges and exchanges of e-services between the two countries. The technical solution enabling exchanges of data between Estonia and Finland via X-Road, which created preconditions for the implementation of cross-border e-services to facilitate the lives of people who visit the other country often and are active in both countries as entrepreneurs or otherwise, was completed in February 2018.

Under the agreement on the exchange of commercial register data signed in February 2019, Estonia and Finland committed to  mutually open to each other their commercial register services and provide to the other commercial register authority the same public registry data that is forwarded to the authorities and individuals of their own country.