There are rankings you win with a press release, and rankings you win with a decade of work nobody outside was watching. Digital government belongs to the second kind. In 2023, Chile sat in 32nd place on a table where the world's most developed economies compete. Two years later, in the latest edition, it sits in 10th. There was no ribbon-cutting, no national address. Just a jump of 22 spots that left Chile one hundredth of a point behind France, and the only Latin American country in that exclusive club.

The ranking is called the Digital Government Index (DGI), produced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD, the club of the world's richest economies and strongest public policy. In the 2025 edition, published in February 2026, Chile scored 0.79 out of 1.00 and ranked 10th globally, the best result any Latin American country has ever posted in this index. Above it sits a group that until recently seemed out of reach for any conversation about digital government in Chile: South Korea leads with 0.95, Australia follows with 0.88, Portugal rounds out the podium with 0.86, and the United Kingdom takes fourth with 0.84. Norway, Estonia, Ireland and Denmark tie for fifth with 0.83 each. And one step above Chile, in 9th place, sits France with 0.80. The gap between the two countries is one hundredth of a point: a technical tie between a European power with centuries of state machinery behind it and a South American country of 20 million people.

The number is striking on its own, but the more interesting question isn't how far Chile climbed, it's how it got there. The answer has less to do with a single announcement and more with infrastructure built quietly over more than a decade, under a name anyone in Chile recognizes the moment they hear it: ClaveÚnica.

Why Chile Did It from the Civil Registry, Not from Banking

The comparison with Europe usually starts on the wrong foot: there, most digital identity systems were born from partnerships between the state and private banking. BankID, the system Sweden and Norway use for nearly every digital transaction, is a bank consortium. Chile took a different road. In 2010, the Civil Registry launched Clave Internet, the direct forerunner of what is now called ClaveÚnica: a single username and password, issued by the state, giving access to the country's digital procedures with one login. It wasn't born from a bank or a tech company. It was born from a public institution that decided to solve a coordination problem between state services before anyone was talking about digital transformation as a policy category.

That first step from 2010 kept getting completed with pieces that arrived later, each one closing a specific security or coverage gap. On December 16, 2024, the Civil Registry added a digital ID card and passport to the phone, voluntary and complementary to the physical document, carrying 32 security features on the ID and 70 on the passport. A year later, between September and December 2025, ClaveÚnica began rolling out a second authentication factor, the same security layer already used by banks and systems like BankID, starting with institutions that handle higher transactional risk: the unemployment insurance fund (AFC), the Public Criminal Defender's Office, the national police, and by year's end, the financial markets regulator (CMF). Every institution that joined was, in practice, proof that the platform could grow more secure without losing the mass adoption it had already earned. It's the same underlying logic behind another quiet record: starting a company in under 24 hours also runs, underneath it all, on this same digital state infrastructure.

Seen together, the timeline sends a clear message: no single milestone explains the 22-spot jump. It was a deliberate accumulation of pieces, each one closing the gap the previous one left open. That's the difference between building a system and digitizing one procedure at a time.

The Top Ten Club: South Korea, Portugal, Estonia and Chile

Making the OECD's top 10 isn't an isolated achievement in digital identity: it's an average grade across dozens of public policies, from open data to interoperability between ministries. And within that average, Chile has one component where it shines brighter than the rest: the dimension the OECD calls 'user-driven', services built around people's actual needs. There, Chile ranks 5th in the world, with 0.90 out of 1.00, a better position than in the overall ranking. That's a specific signal: it's not just that Chile has decent internal management, it's that the experience of the person actually using the system (logging in once with a single ID number and password, instead of filling out the same form at every agency) is among the best designed on the planet.

That number helps explain why the rest of the top 10 doesn't feel forced. The other nine countries in the ranking are high-income economies with decades of digitized state machinery: South Korea, Australia, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Norway, Estonia, Ireland, Denmark and France. None of them is from Latin America. None, except Chile. The comparison isn't meant to say Chile beat France, because it didn't: France still sits one place higher, at 0.80 against Chile's 0.79. What's actually interesting is something else: the distance between being outside that conversation entirely and sitting at the same table as France, Estonia or South Korea is now one hundredth of a point. That kind of closeness isn't explained by a government announcement or a press launch. It's explained by institutions that had already been working well for years before anyone outside noticed.

Seen this way, the chart isn't just a list of rich countries with Chile tacked on at the end. It's a snapshot of the league the country's digital state infrastructure ended up playing in, built on the same ID number and the same password most of the population already uses.

Sixteen Million People Are Already in That League

The OECD ranking measures public policy, but behind it sits a simpler question: how many people actually use this. The answer, in ClaveÚnica's case, is 16 million registered users, according to the official figure from the Digital Government Secretariat at Chile's Ministry of Finance. Against a total population of 20,206,953 estimated by Chile's National Statistics Institute (INE) for 2025, that works out to roughly 79% of the entire country holding one single password to the state.

Sixteen million people in Chile already hold one single password for nearly any government procedure. That isn't a projection or a future target: it's the number of registered users today.

Set against the rest of the world, that scale of adoption isn't a fluke, and it isn't automatic either: it's in the same order of magnitude as systems with far more time on the road. SingPass, Singapore's digital identity system, covers about 97% of the eligible population aged 15 and up, with 4.2 million users. BankID, in Sweden, reaches 99.9% of the population aged 18 to 67, with 8.6 million users. MitID, in Denmark, is mandatory from age 15 and counts 5.5 million registered people. None of these systems measure coverage with the exact same methodology (total population, age-eligible population and active users all vary by country), so this isn't a number-for-number ranking, it's a picture of scale. And on that picture, Chile plays in the same league as Scandinavia and Southeast Asia, with one structural difference worth underlining: that trust wasn't built by a bank or a private consortium. It came from the Civil Registry, the same institutional root behind the international trust that backs the Chilean passport today.

The table isn't a ranking of who does it best. It's proof of scale: once a country's digital identity system reaches 8 out of 10 people, it stops being a niche tool and becomes the standard front door to the state, the same way it already works in the Nordics and in Singapore.

Everything above (the ranking, the near-tie with France, the top ten club) can start to feel abstract unless it's brought down to one person running one errand on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. It's worth closing on the number that actually matters if you're reading this from Chile.

Eight out of ten people in the country already use ClaveÚnica. That isn't an intention or a five-year target: it's people logging into the Civil Registry, the tax service or the treasury's website right now, with the same ID number and the same password. Climbing 22 spots in the OECD's digital government ranking, landing one hundredth of a point from France, and becoming the only Latin American country in that top ten, all without ever building it through banking... not bad for a country that decided to do it right. We are bacán.