Yakya

Business without borders in a Brexit-bordered world

Why Estonia?

As I said elsewhere (Frogologue & Co), personal circumstances will mean lots of travel between France and UK. I've been a "digital nomad" for quite a few years already, and lived in Estonia for 3. So Estonia's e-residency program is tailor-made. Business and admin are simple. Opening a current account 20-odd years ago took me literally the time it takes to put an ID-card into an ID-reader and hand it back. Likewise, every year there's a geeky sort of competition to see who can file their income-tax returns the fastest. Usual time is under 3 minutes, the best is about 1 minute.

Tallinn, the capital, is one of the world's first "smart cities" and according to Transparency International's corruption perception index Estonia is one of the least corrupt countres there are, currently in 12th place alongside the banana republic of Canada and well ahead of both France and the UK sharing 20th place. Looks like my money-laundering days are gonna have to stop 🤫

Like it or not, IT, AI, deep-learning, machine-translation and others will have an increasing effect on all our businesses, interpreting no less. Estonia will be one of the countries leading this, and I intend to be part of this.