First cross-border e-government service launched

Europe's first cross-border e-government service has been launched. RISER (Registry Information Service on European Residents), currently available as a pilot scheme, allows companies across Europe to obtain official address information for Germany, Austria and Ireland. By logging on and registering with the web portal www.riser.eu.com, businesses can verify the addresses of potential and current customers in these countries, as the portal provides access to EU member states' individual civil registry databases.

The TSSG is a member of this initiative, which is supported by the European Commission's e-Ten programme. It is anticipated that the Riser service will gradually expand to include address information from other EU member states as the objective of the RISER project is, to create a Trans-European Internet service offering official address information to companies and citizens. The service will communicate with customers at any location via a secure Internet infrastructure based on open standards. It is supplied with data by the local offices in civil registration all over Europe.

The customers of the service are expected to be mainly solicitors' offices, banking institutions, insurance agencies, mail order companies and eBusiness providers.
RISER will offer widespread economic benefit to these users. Through its scope of service, it will provide verified addresses of customers and debtors irrespective of their place of residence and reducing effort and costs of inquiries. Additional address inquiries will be processed much faster compared to traditional paper and mail based processing.

The protection of personal data and the security of the entire system are of special importance for RISER and these features are based on a matured and (in Germany) already certified technical solution. Through the separation of content and transportation data and by using hybrid encryption, unauthorized use of data is prevented.

RISER is a precursor for other European developments, within the pan-European context, that exchange sensitive and personal data.

For more information about the RISER project at the TSSG contact:
Conor Ryan, Project Manager
cryan(at)tssg.org