When European funds New generation After making headlines, the big question was not whether this money was needed, but whether Spain’s bureaucratic apparatus would be able to effectively redistribute such a volume of capital. Three years later, the verdict of the Digital Kit program shows that it is achievable, especially if it involves a good dose of technological innovation. This plan to aid the digitalization of SMEs and the self-employed closed its acceptance of applications last October, and although it continues to grant the subsidies requested in the last days before the closure, it has already distributed more than 3.5 billion euros.
This figure represents 127% of the initial target set by the European Commission and shows that the program has exceeded all expectations. Currently, there are more than 880,000 grants granted to SMEs and the self-employed, distributed across 7,500 municipalities in Spain, or 92% of the total territory. and Red.es, the public company in charge of its management, they do not exclude that it could even exceed one million after analyzing the latest requests.
However, behind these important macroeconomic figures lies a deeper and more discreet transformation. It’s not just about the necessary digitalization of a small hardware store or family business; This is the digitalization of the state apparatus itself. To manage the flood of requests, Red.es deployed a team of 39 artificial intelligence bots that helped process requests.
This radical automation made it possible to automatically carry out more than 25 million requirements checks, crossing data from the Treasury, Social Security and Notaries in real time. What once required weeks of management review now happens in the cloud. Thanks to collaboration with the General Council of Notaries, the validation of the legal representation of candidates is carried out in a few seconds in 99.7% of requests.
The “zero paper” bureaucracy
“At Red.es we will no longer work as before,” explains Víctor Rodrigo, director of systems and digital kit of the entity, during the event on the assistance program organized for the editorial staff of elDiario.es. The scale of the operation would have been unaffordable with traditional methods. The paradox, reveals Rodrigo, is that this administrative robotization ended up humanizing the service: the time that civil servants saved in examining files was invested in 700,000 calls to help businesses.
“We called proactively when we detected a problem, an end of deadline or something that could hinder the execution of the aid contract. In this case, I think that digital has made us more human in a certain way, because we help people have a better experience with the Administration through technology,” explains Rodrigo.
Territorial deployment was the other great challenge of an often disconnected Spain. The program has managed to penetrate 92% of Spanish municipalities. In more than nine out of ten localities in the country, at least one SME or self-employed person has received aid.
A capillarity in which the role of the Spanish Chamber of Commerce and its network of territorial chambers was key, whose mission was to support candidates to facilitate the process and recommend the services most likely to help their respective businesses. Julián López Arenas, director of competitiveness of this organization, gave as an example a case that sums up the changing times better than any statistic: a livestock farm that used the bonus not to create a complex corporate website, but to install collars with geolocation on its cows, preventing them from getting lost in the field.
The wish and the work, both at this moment and during the opening period of the application period, is that the program is not an anecdote. Let this be the start of a new phase of digitalization of small Spanish businesses. “Kit Digital lays the foundations,” recalls López Arenas, emphasizing that the objective is for investment in digitalization to continue once the initial bonus is spent, generating inertia that ends up becoming structural.
One bonus, two beneficiaries: the role of digital agents
European funds not only helped those who received them, but also those who implemented them. The Digital Kit model has functioned as a liquidity injector into the domestic technology sector. 97% of digitization agents – technology companies that provide services to beneficiaries – are also SMEs and self-employed workers.
The data reveals that participation in this subsidy “mechanism” was also a very important boost for these companies. Companies that acted as Digital Kit suppliers increased their sales by an average of 65%, compared to the national technology sector’s average growth of 24% over the past four years. María José Rodríguez, from La Clave Gráfica, represents this sector which has had to do some teaching with the client: “The Digital Kit has been great in dispelling the self-employed’s reluctance towards investment,” she said during the debate.
For beneficiaries in traditional sectors, such as Control Entálpico (a company specializing in industrial refrigeration), the aid meant abandoning paper work reports, sometimes indecipherable by workers’ writing, in favor of digital systems. “Whoever sees a van or a uniform, the first thing they will do is see the website,” added Elisabet Jiménez, beneficiary of the program, emphasizing that the digital presence has ceased to be an extra and has become the new obligatory business card.
The myth of the “free cell phone”
One of the most closely watched areas of the program has been the category of “safe workplace” assistance, which includes the delivery of a laptop. A rumor spread on social media that SMEs and freelancers were simply asking for help and then reselling the device without even taking it out of the box. Víctor Rodrigo explained clearly why this was simply not possible: “The equipment must work for 12 months and be used. It cannot be removed, it cannot be given away.”
Red.es does not depend on the user’s word: it monitors the newspapers (logs) of access and use of these devices. If the computer ends up in a drawer or is resold, reimbursement of the aid amount is requested. Despite the noise, official data indicates that incidents are minimal: formal complaints represent just 0.3% of the million and a half signed agreements, and are generally due to classic commercial disagreements (delays or disagreements with web design) rather than systemic fraud, Rodrigo said.
Monitoring takes place from within the system: an anti-fraud unit designed from the ground up monitors newspapers the access and connectivity patterns of devices, the digital traces that reveal whether equipment is actually working or gathering dust on a shelf. Control goes beyond the end user; The algorithms also analyze the scanned agents, detecting through artificial intelligence those who repeat suspicious errors or abnormal patterns in their justifications. When an irregularity is detected, it is reported to the corresponding agency.
Real-time radiography: the Kit Digital 360 portal and the obsession with data
With the application phase closed but the execution phase still active, Red.es has decided to open the engine room to the public. Víctor Rodrigo announced the launch of Kit Digital 360, a portal designed not to process, but to visualize the impact of the millions injected into the economy. “We wanted to share a lot of lessons learned,” he explained, presenting the tool as an exercise in radical transparency, unusual in public administration.
The platform functions as a dashboard powered by the enormous volume of information processed by automation systems, which currently manage 28 million documents. It allows any user to go down to geographical detail: select a specific province to see how many exact beneficiaries there are in this territory or analyze the real impact on the productivity of SMEs. It is the final link in a chain of digitization that began with a team of robots validating a signature and ends with accountability: transforming the bureaucratic “black box” into a window of data accessible to society.
Kit Digital is a Spanish government program, managed by Rouge.esan entity attached to the Ministry of Digital Transformation and Public Service through the Secretary of State for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence, and has the Spanish Chamber of Commerce as a collaborating entity. The program, financed by the European Union through NextGenerationEU funds, As part of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, it was designed to digitalize SMEs and independents in all sectors.
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