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Suomi.fi celebrates 20th anniversary:
 The vision for Suomi.fi carried the printed Citizen's Manual into a national digital infrastructure

Publication date 12.12.2022 13.06 | Published in English on 13.12.2022 at 13.44
Press release

Making everyday life smoother in different life events has been the core of Suomi.fi, which was launched 20 years ago. Over the years, digital services have emerged alongside the service content. Today, Suomi.fi is an entity of digital service support services consisting of 11 different services.

The website, which crosses the organisational boundaries of public administration and is based on life events, was revolutionary from the outset. Suomi.fi was the famous “one stop” from where you would start to resolve something, if you did not know which agency the matter belonged to.

Useful links from Utsjoki to Hanko 

The precursor to Suomi.fi was a robust 400-page Citizen's Manual, the table of contents of which already largely resembled the structure of Suomi.fi's instructions. We were already using the latest technology in the 1990s. The Manual was also available as a "hyperbook" CD-ROM, floppy disks, and on the Telmo service.

Hyperlinks were, once, the peak of technology. In addition to the instructions on Suomi.fi', it contained links to all public administration and Finnish municipal services from Utsjoki to Hanko. It took three months for three civil servants to review and supplement the links of the entire country - and then they had to start again.  

Nowadays, public administration and municipal service information is described in a decentralised manner in the Suomi.fi Finnish Service Catalogue, from which the data is utilised through its APIs in different services. 

For a smooth everyday life    

The vision at the head of developing the Suomi.fi Web Service is to support people in their everyday lives: from having a baby, becoming independent and entering the workforce, from family care and public guardianship to the death of a loved one; from planning, growth and, internationalisation of a company to changes of ownership. 

A great deal of new events, such as data breaches and the coronavirus, have been included. AI-assisted services are also on their way, as the technical features of the AuroraAI network are introduced to Suomi.fi.

Part of Finland's digital infrastructure

For organisations, the Suomi.fi family offers shared digital services. Suomi.fi enables them to provide secure communications, acting on behalf of another party, payment transactions, a service map and secure data transfer between organisations. 

Quality tools, test materials and tools for developing the interoperability of glossaries, code sets and data models have been published to support the development of the services. 

Suomi.fi has grown into a central part of Finland's national digital infrastructure, which is also of international interest. Suomi.fi services are visited by officials responsible for developing digital services, politicians and representatives of companies and international organisations around the world.

Suomi.fi – 20 years in service

In a nutshell

  • The Suomi.fi family includes Identification, Messages, Authorizations, Payments, Maps, the Suomi.fi Finnish Service Catalogue, the Test Material Service, Quality Tools, Data Exchange Layer, Open Data, and the Interoperability Platform. 
  • The most popular Suomi.fi services are Identification (200 million transactions in 2021), Authorizations (more than 30 million electronic credentials created by users since 2017) and Messages (nearly one million users). 
  • The first Suomi.fi Web Service was published on 1 April 2002. Over the years, separate digital services in public administration (e.g. Katso, Yrityssuomi, Asiointiopas, Citizen's Account) have been merged into the common Suomi.fi family. 
  • The Suomi.fi services were overhauled in the National Service Architecture Programme during 2014-2016. The Act on Electronic Government services entered into force in 2016.
  • In the 2020s, the use of Suomi.fi will grow and expand. Strong development of new services and new ways of utilising them will continue.