Timeline

The book «A vision for the future of public management and relations with citizens» is published.

After 20 years of experience in international companies and consulting, Iván Nabalón combines his passion for technology with his experience of public administration projects and writes the book that would lay the foundations for the Foundation.

At the height of his professional career, he finds his purpose: exploring how technology can improve people’s lives by strengthening democracy.

He leaves his position as an executive at an international management consulting firm to create a project aimed at transforming democracy.

civitana.org is created, the world’s first civic participation network with legal assurance.

He raises funds from family and friends to create civitana.org, the first civic participation network with legal assurance, combining the efficiency of social networking technology with the security and legitimacy of an early, easy-to-use electronic identity card.

The first version of Electronic IDentification, an easy-to-use digital signature, is created. VideoID is also developed, enabling something unprecedented at the time: remote identification of citizens with the same technical security as face-to-face identification.

The banks take us to the regulator that requires secure identification for financial transactions: SEPBLAC – Servicio Ejecutivo de la Comisión de Blanqueo de Capitales e Infracciones monetarias. After seeing the technology, and in time, it decides to create pioneering regulation that enables banks to identify people online through video identification.

The regulation allows banks to integrate this form of identification and acquire new customers online, creating an opportunity and, ultimately, a new industry in electronic security. As the first company to develop video identification technology, Civitana becomes Electronic IDentification (eID), giving the project a second chance in the private sector.

During this period, eID established itself as the world’s first electronic trust services provider to offer a qualified digital signature with full legal equivalence to a handwritten signature. This milestone was not only a technological achievement, but also an extensive process of regulatory learning and technical execution.

Building on the pioneering regulatory developments in Spain and Europe, we worked with digital identity regulators across four continents and more than 50 countries, from China, Japan and Vietnam to the United States and every country in Latin America.

This stage was critical not only because of commercial growth, but also because of the deep development and learning it brought from a global perspective. We became technical authorities, acquiring the standing and influence needed to understand how digital identity could, in the future, protect not only financial and healthcare transactions, but also citizens’ fundamental rights by enabling them to participate actively in public life.

That year, we worked with Instituto de Empresa on a study based on the premise that social trust, supported by a strong official identity, is a pillar of modern societies because it creates the confidence needed for secure relationships. We found a direct correlation between institutional strength and citizens’ wellbeing: each one-percentage-point improvement in The Economist’s democracy index has a positive impact of 13.6% on quality of life. This progress translates into a US$13,286 increase in per capita income, a 2.6-year gain in life expectancy and a two-point reduction in the inequality coefficient, demonstrating that stronger democracy leads directly to economic prosperity and social equity.

In the summer of 2020, eID won Europe’s largest contract to digitise France’s social security card for more than 45 million citizens, beating leading competitors in France and Germany at the time.

Since then, the digital identity technology created at civitana.org has become the internet standard for identifying millions of people every day, not only in finance but also in other regulated sectors such as healthcare and public administration—the purpose for which it had been created eight years earlier.