Italian postal service launches project to ease issuance of digital ID, other services

The Italian national postal service (Poste Italiane) has launched a new digital ID initiative to transform post offices in small towns across the country into digital service hubs.

Called ‘Polis,’ the new service project officially launched on January 30 and will see the deployment of digital technologies across 7,000 Italian municipalities with less than 15,000 inhabitants.

Following the deployments, residents will be able to access several online services, such as requesting registry and civil status certificates, electronic ID cards, passports, tax codes (codice fiscale) for newborns, and social security and judicial certificates.

Unveiling the project in Rome, the President of Poste Italiane, Maria Bianca Farina, and the CEO, Matteo Del Fante, also confirmed several other services would be available to citizens as part of the Polis project, including financial, logistics, insurance and telecommunications services.

“The Polis project was conceived to guarantee 16 million Italians who live in municipalities with fewer than 15,000 inhabitants equal access to the many public administration services, bringing them closer to the State in a concrete way,” comments Del Fante. “Its implementation also helps to accelerate the country’s digital transformation.”

The initiative was financed with €800 million (roughly US$863 million) of funds under the EU’s National Plan for Complementary Investments to the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), a fund established by the Union to help member countries tackle the economic effects of the Covid pandemic.

The upgrading of post office infrastructure reportedly started after the green light from the European Commission at the end of October 2022.

At the time of writing, 40 post offices have been fully upgraded, while 230 others are currently undergoing renovations. Poste Italiane intends to complete work on an additional 1,500 new Polis offices by the end of the year.

The new initiative comes months after the Italian Government confirmed that the national digital ID scheme in Italy reached a milestone of 30 million created accounts.

Article Topics

civil registration  |  digital ID  |  digital ID cards  |  digital identity  |  government services  |  Italy