I am now e-resident of Estonia

A couple of months ago I wrote about Estonia’s innovative e-residency project. Shortly after I applied for an e-residency myself. This can be done online. After entering all necessary data, providing a passport scan and paying the application fee of 50 Euro, I only had to wait for the email notifying me that my smart e-resident ID card + card reader were ready for pickup at the Estonian embassy. This took a little bit longer than I expected, but a few days ago I received the email.

So here I am, proudly calling myself e-resident of Estonia. Whenever I want to use Estonia’s e-services, like opening a business or running banking errands, I insert the ID card into a USB reader and authenticate myself through a dedicated software. At the moment I do not know whether I will have immediate use of the e-residency (as an actual resident of Sweden I already enjoy some quite advanced e-government services). But I felt that such an unconventional idea deserves full support, and I am pretty excited to see how this initiative will develop in the future. Other countries, take note!