In 2020, SK’s stable and fast growth continued in terms of geography, business, and our personnel. We increased our teams in Estonia and Latvia and by the end of the year, 59 people in total were working in SK’s various offices. We implemented multiple internal structural changes. As a result of one of these, we created the Business Relations department which spans all of the Baltic states and is led by Sanita Meijere from our Latvian office. The board of SK ID Solutions also appointed the company’s Business Development Manager, Liisa Lukin its second member.

The beginning of the year marked 3 years since the creation of the first Smart-ID accounts, which also meant that the certificates of these accounts had to be updated. Keeping this in mind, we introduced a new onboarding method in February ­– the option of creation a new Smart-ID account with biometrics. To our knowledge, it is the first solution in Europe to use AI based identity validation to issue a qualified certificate for electronic signatures. Additionally, this issuing process has been confirmed to meet the high level of assurance of the identification scheme.

Since February, all Smart-ID users can use Smart-ID to sign documents with the DigiDoc4 software. In September, Smart-ID support was also added to the DigiDoc mobile app. One of the most exciting integrations we implemented for Smart-ID was with the global signature solution Adobe Sign. This provides the Baltic branches of large enterprises with completely new options for cross-border signing.

The Solutions created by SK turned out to be crucial tools for millions during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, in Lithuania, the number of documents signed with Mobile-ID and Smart-ID doubled during the span of one month after a state of emergency was declared in the country. By May, 50% of Lithuanian bank clients were using Smart-ID to conduct their everyday banking activities. Smart-ID was introduced as one solution for easing the pandemic at the virtual business forum Global Business Summit.

Estonian Information System Authority announced that Smart-ID is the most popular authentication method used in the central state authentication service TARA, surpassing both Mobile-ID and the ID-card.

In summer, the number of Mobile-ID users in Lithuania passed the 300 000 mark. Meanwhile, there were around 245 000 Mobile-ID users registered in Estonia.

To find innovative solutions to combat the increasing number of phishing attacks, we started cooperation with TalTech’s Department of Software Science in October. The year-long project is being funded by the European Regional Development Fund.

In October, we stopped offering the DigiDocService web service, first introduced in 2004. This decision is a part of SK’s strategic direction towards focusing even more on the development of authentication and electronic signature solutions. After the expiration of the last TLS certificate, we also ended our Server Authentication service. This has been an ongoing process, which has now come to an happy ending.

In cooperation with one of Finland’s most successful card solutions company CardPlus, we once again started offering the tachograph service.

In November, instead of organising the traditional SK Annual Conference, we shared the most important news of the year via video from the SK news studio.

In December, SK was accepted as a full member of the ETSI. Starting from 2020 SK is member of Association of Lithuanian Banks and associate member of Finance Latvia Association.

By the end of the year, our services were being used by 3.8 million people in the Baltics AKA by every second Baltic citizen. In 2020, 1.7 billion queries were made across our services. 0.7 billion of those comprised Smart-ID queries.

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