Eight years ago, Estonia created a program to make the digital services it offered its citizens accessible to those of other countries through electronic residency. Known as e-Residency, this digital identity document allows processes such as buying a house or opening a company, without the need to travel in person or hire anyone locally.
Since then, this pioneering proposal has convinced more than 96,000 people from 180 countries around the world. "If they all came to Estonia, they would constitute the second largest city in the country," explains Lauri Haav, CEO of the e-Residency program. "More e-Residents are created than babies are born," he adds. Of all of them, some 23,000 have created companies, a figure that represents 20% of the new businesses generated in the Baltic country, with a tax system friendly to investment.
With the pandemic, Estonia's electronic residency accelerated in Spain, where it now has some 5,000 e-Residents, of whom 1,900 have established a company based in the country. About a fifth of the Spaniards who have applied for e-Residency are Catalans, with a total of 926 who have requested it. Catalan e-Residents have created 302 Estonian companies (33%), mainly from Barcelona, but also from other cities such as Terrassa, Sabadell, Castelldefels, Sitges, Calafell, Cambrils, Salou, Tarragona, Mataró, Lloret de Mar, Palamós, Calella or Girona.
One of them is Jesús Picornell, CEO and founder of Globalspark, a startup created at the end of 2019 that offers mobile apps for GPS users. Picornell entered the business world by chance, he emphasizes, after creating software for himself that he saw he could commercialize. When he embarked on the task of setting up a company, taking into account that he was going to maintain his main occupation as a Computer Science professor, he saw that the easiest option was that of Estonian digital residency. "Everything is very agile and centralized in a single portal where all operations are carried out," he stresses. Not only at the time of incorporation, but also in subsequent procedures, such as the declaration he has to fill out once a year about registered income, expenses and profits, which does not take him more than half an hour. "If I had had to create the company here, I wouldn't have done it," he maintains.
The type of companies for which this Estonian residency works best, according to Haav, are digital ones like Globalspark, without a physical product to market, but also for those with clients and workers spread across different countries, a trend accelerated by the generalization of teleworking. It also works for SMEs that want to internationalize, the spokesperson emphasizes, taking into account that there are few procedures to complete and that they can be done quickly, which is especially interesting for companies with a reduced structure, also decreasing costs.
Despite the fact that in Madrid they have more facilities to obtain e-Residency, considering that it has to be picked up at the embassy, Catalonia surpasses the number of e-Residents and companies created compared to the Madrid community. Specifically, the figure stands at 744 e-Residents and 220 companies created (30%) in Madrid. To speed up the obtaining of the digital identity document, the Estonian program is testing a pilot in which the consul is traveling to Barcelona to regularly deliver e-Residency to entrepreneurs located in the Catalan capital.