Enhancing European Interoperability Frameworks to Leverage Mobile Cross-Border Services in Europe

In times where personal contacts must be reduced and in-person meetings and appointments have become difficult, electronic services are continuously gaining relevance. This especially applies to the public-sector domain, where e-government services have become a main pillar for the interaction between citizens and public administrations. In the European Union (EU), such service must not only be provided on national level but must be made accessible to all EU citizens, in order to satisfy the needs of a converging European society. The EU and its legal bodies support the provision of pan-European e-government services by means of various legal and technical frameworks. Two relevant frameworks in this context are the Single Digital Gateway Regulation, which facilitates cross-border retrieval of user data, and the eIDAS Regulation, which enables authentication of users across borders by federating the EU Member States' national identity management systems. While each framework has already successfully proven its potential individually, challenges arise when both frameworks are combined and jointly used by e-government services. This effect is even aggravated, if these e-government services do not follow a classical browser-based paradigm, but instead make use of and rely on mobile technologies. The Horizon 2020 project mGov4EU tackles these challenges. It develops technical solutions to help e-government services employ the full potential of the SDG and the eIDAS Regulation. Thereby, it especially focuses on mobile, i.e., app-based services. Technical solutions developed by mGov4EU will be evaluated by means of several mobile pilot applications. This paper identifies and describes the challenges addressed by mGov4EU and introduces mGov4EU's solutions to overcome them. This way, this paper proposes a strategy to leverage the full potential of SDG and eIDAS also in mobile application scenarios, and hence paves the way for future successful mobile cross-border services.