Who we are

We are a joint cooperation between BITS and the Norwegian Digitization Agency.

Bits AS is the financial infrastructure company of the bank and finance industry in Norway. Our job is to ensure a safe and efficient payment infrastructure for financial payment transactions and related information.

The Norwegian Digitalisation Agency is the Norwegian government’s foremost tool for faster and more coordinated digitalisation of the Norwegian public sector. The Norwegian Digitalisation Agency is subordinate to the Ministry of Local Government and Modernisation.

The leading Norwegian bank DNB has generously agreed to make one full time resource available as tech lead and the only full time member of the core team.

We are funded by public funds and grants from the Banking union and operate as a non commercial entity where the only goal and mandate is to facilitate the adoption and usage of remote on-boarding providing a benefit to society.

What we do

Our goal is to ensure remote digital on boarding happens for the benefit of society. Our work is done by the following venues.

• Working with the competent authorities who are part of the core team.

• Working with the public sector, the banks and the banking union as key stakeholders of usage.

• Working with electronic identity providers.

• Working with vendors of remote identification solutions.

The following pages describes this in more detail. Our most important ongoing initiative is the work on providing a robust, secure and implementation friendly requirement specification. The current public draft can be found here.

We are actively pursuing dialogues within.

• Standardization organizations.

• The eIDas cooperation network.

As a part of our mandate we are available for confidential discussions with anybody in this field. This includes.

• Solution providers.

• Technology vendors.

• Auditors and conformance assessment bodies.

• Academic or research entities whishing to get involved.

• Interested potential stakeholders in the public or private sector.

Any party interested may contact us using the contact form.

Why we believe this to be important.

Onboarding is the last mile in digitization. We believe.

• There is no reason to mandate personal appearance. It is fully feasible to perform this remote with an increased reliability and an increased security.

• We are sure that there are huge efficiency gains for society. An article stipulating the order of magnitude can be found here.

• We find that this is being utilized currently but where there is really a wild, wild west out there. There is no common standards, no oversight and a situation where regulatory arbitrage is happening. This was the key finding in the part 1 of the report by the EU expert group.

  We want to do something with this by.

• Making standards facilitating objective measurements on level of reliability based on the adherence to these specifications.

• Demonstrate and educate to show how this increases reliability, security and facilitates even better countermeasures against organized crime.

• During the duration of Covid-19 (stipulated to last 2-3 years) we believe this important for the foundation of sociality but especially for the vulnerable groups.

  More information can be found on our history and timeline page.