Spain breaks through the 3 million electronic ID cards barrier

Right now there are more than 3 million and in 2008 it will reach 9 million.

The Spanish police force has just made public the fact that there are now more than 3m electronic ID cards in the country. The Electronic National Identity Document (eDNI) is the new identification document in Spain.

Official estimates suggest that there will be more than 5m eDNI cards by the end of 2008. Given that at the end of 2007 there were 2m, this suggests that 4m will be issued in 2008. Paco Ros, Secretary of State for Communications, and Salvador Soriano, Deputy Director General of Information Society Services were kind enough to meet us in February and confirmed to us that these predictions were deliberately ‘conservative’.

This graph uses data published by the Spanish police force (real and projected) and shows the evolution of the distribution of the DNIe. Each block represents half a million eDNI cards. You can see that from summer 2007 an average of 400,000 cards were issued every 45 days, 500,000 in February 2008 and, we understand that some 20,000 are now issued every day i.e. 600,000 a month. At this rate, 9m cards will have been issued by the end of this year.

In March, all police stations will issue only DNIe

Another interesting piece of information is that right now, 90% of police stations issue only DNIe and during the month of March, they expect to reach 100%. If this aim is achieved, in April it won’t be possible to get an old DNI. Therefore, they’re studying initiatives to encourage people to renew their DNI before it expires, at no cost to the citizen. On this map, you can find the nearest police station which will issue you an eDNI.

The adoption of all police stations along with the appointment system recently put in place should stabilise the demand and eliminate the long queues that people have suffered to get an eDNI. The government is waiting to resolve this capacity problem before increasing the budget for distributing the eDNI. Very soon promotional campaigns, free card readers with newspapers etc. will become commonplace. It seems a good time to start to think about making the most of this new and powerful infrastructure.

By David Blanco
Saved in: Announcements, e-Signatures | No comments » | 11 March 2008