TL;DR: During the pandemic a surge in new company registrations exposed how much administration entrepreneurs were carrying, with certificates and permits arriving from different agencies in different formats. Bolagsverket built a concept called Proof of Business with TRUE in eight weeks, and then received a government mandate to investigate a second phase covering licences, trademark certificates and company registrations.
The pile on the entrepreneur's desk.
When new business registrations surged during the pandemic, the inefficiency in traditional documentation became hard to ignore. A person starting a company was collecting certificates and permits from several agencies, each in its own format, each needing to be produced again whenever somebody asked.
Bolagsverket wanted something different: one digital place where an entrepreneur could reach every document they needed, securely.
A concept called Proof of Business, developed with TRUE. Official documents become secure digital records that anyone can verify, rather than files a business has to send around and a counterparty has to take on faith.
The part worth noting is the timescale.
“With the help of TRUE, setting up our concept Proof of Business took eight weeks.”
Erika Sjödin is Innovation Officer at Bolagsverket. Eight weeks is not a normal number for a public authority building new digital infrastructure, and it is the reason the second phase exists.
“We have just been given a government assignment to investigate this in a second phase. In this step we will focus on licences, trademark certificates, company registrations and so on.”
That sequence is the real result. A concept that works produces a mandate, and a mandate produces scope: the documents in phase two are the ones businesses are asked to prove most often.
Because the authority is not in the room. A certificate issued by a public body is trusted precisely because of where it came from, and a PDF strips away the only thing that made it trustworthy.
Once a document can be checked instantly, the counterparty stops relying on the appearance of officialdom and starts relying on the record itself. That is a different foundation for public trust, and it scales in a way phone calls do not.
How a government agency can handle its own records. By making documents tamper proof and easy to verify, Bolagsverket improved both trust and efficiency in a public service, and did it as a working concept rather than a policy paper.
As governments elsewhere work through the same questions, the collaboration offers something more useful than a theory: a public authority that built the thing, in weeks, and then was asked to build more of it.
Bolagsverket describes its work at bolagsverket.se. Two authorisation bodies whose documents carry a regulated claim: GVK and Golvbranschen.
The Swedish Companies Registration Office. It registers businesses and holds the official record of who they are.
A concept Bolagsverket developed with TRUE that gives entrepreneurs their official documents in a secure digital form that can be verified rather than trusted.
Eight weeks, according to Erika Sjödin, Innovation Officer at Bolagsverket.
Bolagsverket received a government mandate to investigate a second phase, covering licences, trademark certificates and company registrations.
Because it shows a public authority making its own documents verifiable, which sets an example for how governments can handle official records.
Every organisation on these pages started with the same question. Give us thirty minutes and we will show you what your own documents would be worth.
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