Ukraine to monetise its superapp Diia and introduce AI assistant for government services

The Ukraine government’s superapp, Diia, had a humble beginning in 2020 as a document sharing platform, initially providing access to digital driver's licences and passports. 

In less than five years, as of last October, the government reported that Diia had more than 21 million unique users, offering access to 24 different documents and more than 30 services. 

The range of documents included identity cards, passports, tax numbers (RNOKPP), income certificates, and more. 

Diia is a digital public infrastructure (DPI), which serves as a building block that facilitates secure and efficient access to services across both public and private sectors.

According to the government’s official statement, the Ministry of Digital Transformation revealed that it would start to charge financial institutions for Diia’s document sharing feature and expects to generate revenue from June onwards. 

According to Ukrainian tech media outlet dev.ua, Diia has become a marketplace for businesses to launch their own services on top of state infrastructure.

“It is likely that businesses will be able to pay for placing their services on the Diia platform after passing state verification,” the report said. 

With a revenue generation model in place, there are plans to legally separate the platform into an independent state-owned enterprise, with the aim of preparing it for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in the future. 

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How monetisation works 

Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister for Innovation, Education, Science, and Technology and Minister of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Federov, said financial institutions were willing to pay for the type of seamless, secure user onboarding that Diia provided. 

He cited Diia’s integration with the country’s first digital-only bank, Monobank, where over 22,000 bank accounts were opened in just one day using the digital identity verification through the Diia app. 

According to Diia’s Head of Implementation Team, Oleksiy Vovk, quoted by dev.ua, banks would pay a one-time fee of UA$21,617 (SG$671.71) to connect to the service, and then UA$9.8 (SG$0.30) for each successful sharing. 

She added that the average number of document sharings through Diia exceeds 1.3 million per month. 

The report also noted that a similar approach has been implemented in Estonia, where private services are verified by the state. 

It also highlighted plans by the Ministry to open the electronic signatures and electronic identification service features for the private sector. 

Should the IPO plans come to fruition, Diia’s historic move could set a new global precedent in GovTech innovation, becoming one of the first government-created digital platforms to make the leap into the private sector and public investment, said the government statement. 

Built-in AI assistant  

The Ministry also announced that it will launch a Beta version of a built-in artificial intelligence (AI) assistant in Diia in June. 

The assistant is modelled on ChatGPT and is targeted to help citizens navigate public services and complete applications using natural language prompts. 

Notably, a user could simply describe their situation, say “I had a baby”, and the AI assistant will suggest which services are needed and how to access them, the government announcement (in Ukrainian language) said, as quoted by the national news agency RBC-Ukraine. 

In the future, users could expect to interact with the AI assistant by voice, automatic sending of certificates, and 24/7 digital assistance. 

“We rethought what we were doing with Diia. In 2019-2020, we made a leap and created a sexy application from a UX/UI point of view, where you can quickly receive services.  

“But now AI has changed consumer culture. Anything that will not be similar to ChatGPT, Gemini or other models makes you think about how to use it.  

“To create the best user experience, we need to transform Diia into an AI product,” said Minister Fedorov in the announcement. 

The digital success of Diia did not happen in isolation. Ukraine was also the first country to legislate electronic passports equivalent to the status of traditional biometric paper documents.