The “beginning of a completely different era” for citizens’ transactions with the public – and not only – it marks the opening of the gov.gr wallet to additional services and applications, starting probably from next week, as Dimitris Papastergiou pointed out today, Thursday, from Thessaloniki.

Speaking at a conference organized by the Association of Information Technology Businesses of Greece (SETPE), the Minister of Digital Governance emphasized that the new digital “wallet” of citizens will no longer simply contain their identity card or degree, but will open to new services and applications. such as those concerning -in the first phase- insurance companies and car rentals, with the aim of expanding to the health sector in the future, removing a series of bureaucratic hurdles, documents and queues at services and simplifying important procedures, such as, for example, registering a child in daycare.

“This is a part of a new Greece, which is being built with the many infrastructures that are being created” Mr. Papastergiou noted and reminded that the goal is to have more than 1.6 billion documents digitized by the end of 2025 or the beginning of 2026 . The work of the government, he clarified, is not only spent on creating applications, such as “myGov”, “myGreece” and “myCoast”, or that on violence in stadiums and the digital ticket. Not only in the adoption of Artificial Intelligence tools, around which “the ministry has put out a call for projects worth 20 million euros” (which is currently for internal use, until the Information Society files the relevant technical bulletin). Simultaneously with the applications, important infrastructures are created and supported, such as the “Daedalos” supercomputer, for which the tender is now “in the air”, but also the data centers in Thessaloniki, Athens and the rest of Greece. Another key goal is the skills, for the acquisition of which, as he said, citizens will be supported, so that they are not left out of the labor market, but also to find the workers required to realize digital Greece.

Mr. Papastergiou also recalled the decision taken by the Greek government last September, after the devastating fires and floods in Greece, in order to change the country’s space program, in the direction of activating 15 microsatellites, with the aim of better monitoring of climate and weather forecasting and obtaining more accurate information in relation to coastal erosion, marine pollution, floods and fires. The minister reiterated that very important projects in the field of digital transformation are “running” today, mainly due to the Recovery Fund and the NSRF: “projects that we have never seen before and will probably take several years to see again”, he said and was also mentioned in the climb of Greece in the report on the state of the Digital Decade (in which the DESI index is also integrated).

However, he noted that while Greece is at a very good level in the digital transformation projects of the Recovery Fund, we must not forget that these projects, including information systems, they want maintenance so that there is also cyber security, and for this reason there were not until recently the required funds in the budgets of the ministries. Mr. Papastergiou also reminded that until recently the way of declaring disasters from natural phenomena such as floods was very bureaucratic, but “within a few months a new platform will be ready” which significantly speeds up the procedures, since public services and engineers can they record the losses in a much simpler way and not with a pad and paper, as was the case until now.