Enabling Public Sector Interoperability: AGCM Rating Service on PDND
17.04.2025
One of the latest projects I’ve worked on involved supporting AGCM (Italian Antitrust Authority) in the creation of an e-service on PDND, aimed at enabling authorized entities to query the “Rating di Legalità” of Italian companies. The National Digital Data Platform (PDND) is Italy’s national infrastructure for secure, standardized, and authorized data exchange between public administrations.
The service exposes a RESTful API that receives a company’s tax code (codice fiscale) as input and returns its legal rating along with additional metadata. This rating, managed by AGCM, promotes transparency and ethical business practices by assigning a score from one to three stars to qualifying companies.
We developed the service in Java, implementing the full logic required to integrate with the PDND platform.
This includes:
- Establishing secure endpoints compliant with PDND specifications;
- Validating the authentication token provided by the requester;
- Querying AGCM’s internal systems to retrieve the company’s legal rating;
- Generating a signed response including the requested data, its digital signature and the key ID used for signing.
To better understand how PDND works, here’s a brief overview of the request flow:
- The consumer submits a request to access a specific service;
- Once authorized, they request an authentication token from PDND every time they want to query the service;
- With this token, they directly call the exposed API of the service provider;
- The provider validates the token and processes the request;
- A signed response is returned to the consumer.
PDND is a game changer for public sector interoperability in Italy, offering several key benefits:
✅ Once Only Principle: Citizens no longer need to provide information already known by other public entities.
🔒 Secure Exchange: The platform ensures authentication and encrypted communication between providers and consumers.
📚 Unified Service Catalog: Public bodies can publish and access a single registry of digital services.
🔁 Reusability: Administrative procedures are simplified through standardized and reusable processes.
By leveraging PDND, AGCM can now offer access to legal rating information in a secure, structured, and reusable way — setting a strong example of digital transformation in public administration.
If you're exploring PDND for your organization or working on similar integrations, feel free to connect!