The Banco Central de Reserva de El Salvador (BCR) has become the country’s only fully accredited Certification Service Provider for electronic signatures – issuing over 42,900 certificates, signing agreements with 26 public institutions, and supporting national census operations for over 20,000 field workers. Namirial’s technology underpins the entire ecosystem.
+42k
electronic signature certificates issued
26
public institutions with signed cooperation agreements
+20k
certificates issued for the 2024 census field workers
Introduction
The Banco Central de Reserva de El Salvador (BCR) is the central bank of El Salvador and, since June 2023, the country’s only fully accredited Certification Service Provider for electronic signatures. In a remarkable institutional transformation, the BCR has moved from banking supervision to active digital trust infrastructure – issuing over 42,000 electronic signature certificates, enabling paperless workflows across dozens of government institutions, and supporting national-scale digitalization projects such as the 2024 Population and Housing Census and the 2025 Agricultural and Fisheries Census. Namirial’s technology underpins this entire ecosystem.
Challenges and Drivers for Electronic Signatures in Public Administration
El Salvador’s Electronic Signature Law mandates that all state entities promote the use of electronic documents, certificates, and signatures for citizen-facing services, provided that physical presence is not strictly necessary. The intent of the law is unambiguous: simple and certified electronic signatures shall carry the same legal validity as handwritten ones.
The challenge lay in implementation. Government institutions operated largely on paper-based workflows, with all the associated costs, inefficiencies, and risks: physical archiving, courier dependencies, manual document circulation, and limited auditability. For a country committed to a Paperless Government model and the modernization of public services, a robust, nationally operated trust infrastructure was essential.
An additional challenge was societal: parts of the population – particularly older citizens – were unfamiliar with electronic signatures, requiring not just technology but an education and adoption strategy to be built into the rollout.
Why Did the BCR Need a Qualified Trust Services Provider?
Becoming a Certification Service Provider is not a purely technical undertaking. It requires accreditation by the Ministry of Economy, adherence to PKI standards, and the deployment of infrastructure capable of supporting certificate issuance, identity validation, timestamping, and long-term evidence preservation. For an institution seeking to serve both the public sector and private professionals at national scale, the underlying technology needed to be enterprise-grade, highly available, and capable of supporting API-driven automated signing workflows.
The BCR evaluated its requirements against the full spectrum of technical and regulatory demands: legal validity, compliance with both local Salvadoran regulations and international standards, PKI standards conformance, and the ability to integrate with existing government systems across ministries and public agencies.
Why Namirial?
Namirial was selected as the BCR’s technology partner on the basis of its strong legal validity credentials, compliance with both local Salvadoran regulations and international standards, adoption of recognized PKI frameworks, and the availability and resilience of its infrastructure. Specialized technical support and a commitment to continuous product development were also decisive factors.
Namirial’s solution architecture for the BCR centers on four integrated components: a Payment Gateway for certificate purchase and documentation management, the Signbox API for automated signing and institutional integration, a Certificate Management System (CMS) for identity validation and certificate issuance, and eSignAnyWhere for legally compliant internal and institutional signing workflows.
The results are tangible. Since going live, the BCR has issued over 42,900 electronic signature certificates – 93% to private individuals and professionals, 6% to public entities, and 1% to private companies. It has signed cooperation agreements with 26 institutions, ranging from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the National Health Network. For the 2024 Census alone, more than 20,000 certificates were issued through a biometric-validated digital identity workflow. The BCR has demonstrated that a government institution, with the right technology partner, can become a cornerstone of a nation’s digital transformation.
Learn more about Banco Central de Reserva de El Salvador (BCR)’s activities with Namirial in this recording from Namirial Campus 2026 in Barcelona. Eduardo Antonio Trejo Peraza, Coordinador de Tecnología de Información, and Ricardo Enrique Herrera López, Coordinador de Gestión y Proyectos de TI, talk about how BCR deployed Namirial’s PKIaaS infrastructure to issue over 42,900 electronic signature certificates for individuals, professionals, and public entities