District courts in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, will handle all business relating to the commercial register exclusively in electronic form.

By adopting this solution from Siemens Business Services, North Rhine-Westphalia is blazing a trail not only in Germany but throughout the whole of Europe. The time required to process applications will be slashed and registry queries can be answered round the clock.

“By introducing the electronic commercial register, the legal sector is giving the modernization of public administration an enormous boost,” comments Jürgen Rüttgers, Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia, going on to describe the Siemens Business Services solution as a “stepping stone on the road to debureaucratization”.

When working with the paper commercial register, courts needed an average of 27 days to process an application; in the future, they will require less than a day. And even now the Internet register information service is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so that no-one needing information from the commercial register has to wait until the courts are open for business.

In the future, businesspeople looking to found a new company will submit their application via e-mail or Internet, and the application will then be processed by the court as an “electronic file”. The IT architecture of the electronic commercial register was designed by Siemens Business Services. At its heart is a central database that can be accessed by all court employees, enabling them to process new applications, add entries, order publications in the print media and generate invoices - all in electronic form. The complete contents of the old paper register have already been transferred to the electronic archive.