Aruba and Asseco: a hub for qualified certified delivery

Aruba and Asseco are launching a joint venture to extend legally binding communications beyond national borders. The new company will develop a European hub to which Qualified Trust Service Providers (QTSPs) offering the qualified certified delivery service required by the European eIDAS Regulation will be able to connect.
Currently, every country has its own system for legally binding electronic communications. In Italia, the PEC system has over 20 million mailboxes and is projected to handle 3.5 billion messages by 2026, according to an IDC white paper produced with the support of Aruba. In Poland, there are 4.6 million addresses registered on e-Doręczenia and the number of messages sent has exceeded 100 million, according to data released in August by the Ministry of Digitalisation in Warsaw. These are systems with full legal validity within national borders, built on different rules and protocols. The hub aims to overcome this fragmentation, so that businesses, public administrations and citizens can exchange certified communications even with counterparts in other countries.

The 2025 pilot project
The collaboration between the two companies begins with a pilot project. In May 2025, Aruba and Asseco completed a proof of concept. The test linked the two companies’ qualified certified delivery services – built on different communication protocols – and demonstrated that it is possible to activate cross-border qualified delivery services between Italia and Poland.
“The initiative launched with Aruba in 2025 has demonstrated that different national systems can communicate with one another in full compliance with European regulations,” recalls Andrzej Dopierała, Chairman of Asseco Data Systems. “Today, with the establishment of the joint venture, we are transforming the success of the pilot project we carried out together into a dedicated initiative, with the aim of extending this model to the entire European Union market.”

A hub open to all service providers
The new company takes the model beyond the relationship between the two firms. The hub will be open to all qualified service providers in the EU and is also designed as a gateway to non-European providers of electronic delivery services
The hub will be designed to enable different protocols and technical solutions to communicate with one another, whilst maintaining full compliance with the eIDAS Regulation and the relevant ETSI standards.
The legal basis is the eIDAS 2.0 Regulation, which allows qualified service providers to agree on the interoperability of their respective certified delivery services. The regulation leaves the choice to the operators. The joint venture aims to transform this possibility into a shared infrastructure, with open governance, accessible to qualified operators throughout the EU.
“European regulations make interoperability possible, but they are not enough to achieve it: someone is needed to make it a reality. And that is exactly what we are doing together with Asseco, whose expertise in the field of trust services makes it a natural partner,” explains Andrea Sassetti, managing director of Aruba PEC.

A contract to be sent to Poland
Consider an Italian company that needs to send a contract to a Polish supplier and, in the event of a dispute, prove that the document was dispatched and arrived intact. Its PEC mailbox and the supplier’s delivery address belong to two national systems which, at present, only communicate where their respective providers have established a connection. With the hub, the two service providers will be able to use a common exchange point, and the contract will reach its destination with the guarantees of certified delivery.

Qualified delivery certifies the sending and receipt of the message, the identity of the parties, the date and time of the transactions, and the integrity of the data, which remains confidential and protected against loss and damage. The eIDAS Regulation recognises these proofs as valid legal presumptions throughout the EU.
These are guarantees to which Italian businesses and public administrations are accustomed. According to the IDC study, 78 per cent of professionals use certified email (PEC) every day or every week, and 60 per cent of public administrations use it daily to communicate with other bodies. For 52 per cent of organisations, the main benefit is simplification, a figure that rises to 76 per cent in tax and compliance activities.

‘No one should be forced to change their email account, the software they use or their habits,’ observes Sassetti. “Our job is to enable different systems to communicate with one another, making their complexity invisible, so that sending a certified message to another European country becomes as simple as sending it within one’s own country.”
Data from Istat illustrates the scale of the potential. In 2025, Italia exported goods worth €643.2 billion, more than half of which went to the rest of the single market, and there were more than 22,000 Italian businesses exporting to Poland.

For Dopierała, European competitiveness is at stake. “We are convinced that the development of a solution capable of enabling the exchange of certified documents between different countries in a simple, secure and cost-effective manner will help to make the European economy stronger and more competitive.”

Common rules and digital sovereignty
The project also touches on European digital sovereignty. Much business communication still passes through platforms that lack the guarantees of identification, integrity and delivery required of qualified trust services. A European qualified delivery network is a step towards a communication model based on common rules and legal guarantees recognised throughout the Union.
For Aruba and Asseco, this marks the transition from a two-operator project to a European network, designed to enable communications with legal validity to travel across national borders. “And this is not an initiative reserved for just two operators: the doors are open to anyone who wishes to contribute,” concludes Sassetti.