Katrine Winding is Director General of the Danish Business Authority and serves as the chair of Nordic Smart Government & Business (NSG&B). The initiative has an ambitious goal: to simplify the lives of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and create new business opportunities based on economic data.
“We aim to make it easier to do business in the Nordic countries by making data more accessible across the Nordic borders. We want to make it easy for businesses to use e-documents and e-receipts across borders, so trading within the Nordics can be automated.”
Reaching a Milestone
Winding reveals that 2023 was a milestone, in the sense that Nordic Smart Government & Business created pilots enabling businesses to send and receive e-documents across borders.
“The pilots are significant because they lay the groundwork for future transactions across Nordic borders to go directly between bookkeeping and business systems. We want trade and transactions to happen as easily between the Nordic countries as they happen within a country,” she says.
Beneath the Vision
Most of NSG&B’s achievements in 2023 are not necessarily visible, explains Winding, but they are important to the facilitation of cross-border trade.
“We are working on the technical stuff, to put it simply. This is what lies beneath the vision,” she says.
“All the Nordic countries are quite digitalized, but there are differences. What we have managed to agree upon in NSG&B is a decentralized model, which means that interoperability is key. In other words, we do not need to have the exact same standards or work with the same regulations, as long as the different systems can work together supporting the same vision.”
Exporting A Way of Working
Unlike the EU, the Nordic collaboration contains no regulatory mandate. Winding fears that this will prolong the implementation time and lessen the sense of urgency. She emphasizes that the overall success of the program depends on the way it is implemented nationally.
“Right now, the project is in the implementation phase, where we are wrapping up years of collaboration,” she says.
“It is completely unique that five countries are working together at a technical level like this. We have achieved a collaboration of great value, and we are looking at the possibility of exporting this to the rest of the EU as a way of working.”
