Eröffnungsrede bei der Smart Country Convention 2026 in Berlin

Es gilt das gesprochene Wort!

Dear Minister Matias,

Dr. Wintergerst, Dr. Tobias, 

excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, 

or very simply: good morning everyone!

Welcome to Berlin, to the Smart Country Convention 2026. Dear Mr. Matias, it's a real pleasure to open this convention with you. Portugal, our country of honour, shows what determined reform can achieve. You’ve made real progress in digital government. I've seen a vibrant startup ecosystem myself, and I value our partnership and the personal trust we have built. There is much we can learn from each other. Welcome and thank you for being here.

And a big thank you to Bitkom and Messe Berlin for bringing us together. Congratulations on what you have built here and what you have pulled off. When you enter, it just looks amazing. It's a new record. I feel very proud. This is one of the largest conventions of this kind worldwide – and all this in Germany. Fantastic, so congratulations and thank you.

And, most importantly, thank you to all of you, to everyone who's coming here, who builds, runs, improves public services, makes cities smarter, as well as regions. My ministry and my whole team here, we are very proud to be your partner and the patron of this convention. 

And let me come back to you again, for everyone here who is here at SCCON: thank you for being here, because building secure and sovereign digital solutions for public administration is incredibly important. 

Not just for the government, of course for the people in the country, but it's also important for the economy to grow. And a modern state makes it easy obviously for people. It gives businesses room to grow. And it earns trust by working very well every day. 

So, we have a lot of work to do – I know this. But this is our purpose. And here is what is improving and what we are changing, and how you can join us. I'd like to give you a very brief account. But I'd like to make it specific – rather than bore you with statements on what we should do, what we could do, what we must do. So, here's what's going on: 

First of all, in digitalisation we are expanding what works. That means we are accelerating the rollout of proven services. One out of many examples is online residence registration, which is now available to more than 66 million people in Germany. When you move home, you have enough to organise. Updating your address should be the easy part. 

And secondly, we are bringing together high-volume-services. We are making them only once. Take vehicle registration: one nationwide service should go live in July next year, instead of many separate solutions. 

And good news for founders, as we promised – starting a company online is getting much easier. We've launched the first version in 10 cities, including Berlin, end of August, more cities to come, and we will expand also into more complex legal forms and change the law to make that possible. 

That's on its way. Is everything fast enough? For now, it's not. Too many services are still hard to find or hard to connect. And that brings me to our third task, changing the architecture, so we can build on what works. 

And that is why we are building the Deutschland stack: shared sovereign digital infrastructure, on which administrations, federal system, the states, but also municipalities and companies can develop excellent services. 

It starts with agreed standards and open interfaces, so that systems work together. It rests on sovereign cloud infrastructure, with strong data protection and control over how essential services are run. 

We are connecting registers: where the law allows, authorities to retrieve information securely, instead of asking people to provide it again. Your time is too valuable to spend carrying information from one public office to another. We all know this.

On top come the applications, increasingly powered by AI. We take sovereign solutions and data protection extremely seriously here. Tools for public servants, the wallet, the Deutschland-App, and AI agents that speed up complex infrastructure improvements. 

Open source is central; software that anyone can inspect, improve and reuse, and that companies can help develop. And with openDesk, we are supporting open-source tools for the everyday work of administration. And we have realigned ZenDiS, the Centre for Digital Sovereignty, to strengthen this work.

Our ambition is, together with you, to build great products: intuitive, reliable and useful. Products that people want to use and that public servants can depend on. 
But how do we bring those products to nearly 11,000 municipalities and much faster than today?

The Digitalcenter, the digital center we are building, coordinates and steers our public IT units – ZenDiS, DigitalService, ITZBund and FITKO – with one common mission: bringing the Deutschland-Stack to life at scale. That means rolling our services consistently, supporting and improving them continuously. 

And procurement is part of this. Here at SCCON, we are launching direct awards on Marktplatz Deutschland, starting with Berlin. Public buyers find good solutions faster – and businesses can offer them more easily.

And one word on artificial intelligence. It opens up new possibilities for this work. It comes with a lot of risk, and it's hard to say we have to make this safe and secure. But AI helps public servants find information, work through documents, and prepare responses – leaving more time for the cases that need their judgement.

Our Agentic AI Hub invites start-ups to work with us and with cities on intelligent solutions for public administration that can scale. And we've just entered the second round. 

With SPARK, we have developed AI that cuts processing time for infrastructure approvals by more than 80 %. Spark is now being rolled out to the Länder and public authorities with the first Länder already using it. 

For citizens, these foundations come together in a simple experience. The Deutschland-App will make public services easier to find and use. We're right now in the process of a very critical moment where we have to prove that this technology can scale within a very short period of time to make all services available. But I'm very confident that we will make great progress here. 

And our digital wallet, called d-you, will let people identify themselves securely and present digital credentials. The wallet, as an ecosystem project, will start in January 2027. It's a European project, and we've learned a lot from our friends in Portugal here. This European project is designed to work across borders all the time. Digital identity should make life easier in Lisbon, just as in Leipzig. 

And a wallet is only as useful as the places that accept it. So I invite more companies and public administration to join us and bring it into everyday life. Security and people's control over their own data remain at the heart of this work. 

And I am very grateful that already more than 300 companies are working in our sandbox, bringing solutions to life. We assume that we'll have about 40 applications ready for launch.

And that brings me to a small number with a surprisingly important role: your identity card pin. A quick show of hands: Who knows where to find theirs? Good. I know the feeling when you don't raise your hand. I have good news for you. 

Today I am pleased to announce that the PIN-Rücksetz- und Aktivierungsdienst is back. In English it's called PIN-Reset-Service, we call it PIN-Rücksetz- und Aktivierungsdienst. That's a really silly term. But it's a great service. And now you can once again order a PIN reset letter. It is free of charge. You need your online ID and PIN to get started with the wallet. If you have forgotten your PIN or lost the letter, you can now reset it. And you can act today: at our ministry stand, we can reset your PIN on the spot, it takes less than a minute. 

So, ladies and gentlemen, these halls are full of people who can help make all of this happen. I know that you are doing this already in a very great way. We need your support in this, we can't do this alone. 

I've given you an account of what is working, but there is so much more work to do. But let me be also clear to all municipalities in the Länder: please continue and adopt proven services and help improve them. 

To companies and startups: please, build on these shared foundations. And to our very important public IT partners: help turn successful products into reliable services at scale. 

And please, come to our stand, meet the fantastic team of my Ministry, the BMDS. Meet the team, try the services, bring up questions and ideas, but also your criticism. 

Our ambition is a state that works better so that our country can achieve more. Let us use these three days to build partnerships that last long after SCCON.

I wish you a wonderful, successful convention. And now it's my pleasure to hand over to my great colleague, Minister Matias.

Obrigado, and thank you very much!