The EUDI Wallet: Building trust, unlocking growth in Europe
By Jacques Van Zijp, EVP Europe, IN Groupe
Europe is about to place a digital identity wallet in the hands of every citizen. Handled well, it becomes the trust layer of the European economy and a growth driver for all Member States — simpler everyday interactions, wider access to private and public services, in a single market that finally works at digital speed. A model that has value well beyond Europe.
Anyone who has recently opened a bank account, rented a flat or signed up to a new service knows the routine. Photograph your passport or identity card. Upload a utility bill to prove your address. Enter that same address once more, by hand. Create yet another account. Then wait, sometimes for days, while somebody verifies that you are who you say you are. Try the same in another Member State and the process lengthens again: a certified translation, a notarised copy or a refusal because documents issued in one country cannot readily be verified in another.
Each of these steps asks us to hand over far more information than the transaction actually requires. Proving that you are over eighteen should not require disclosing your name, your address and your date of birth. Proving that you hold a qualification should not require a copy of your diploma, which discloses a good deal that no employer needs to see: your student number, your grades in every subject, the year you were born. Yet across Europe, millions of copies of identity documents sit in inboxes and databases, held by organisations with widely differing standards of security and accountability than what Europe regulations currently impose, long after they have served any purpose.
This is not merely an irritation or a privacy issue. It weighs on local and European economies — in abandoned transactions, duplicated verification costs, slow onboarding, fraud losses and cross-border friction that a single market is supposed to have removed.
By the end of 2026, under the European Digital Identity Regulation, every Member State must make a digital identity wallet available to its citizens. The deadline is often discussed as a compliance obligation. That framing badly undersells what is at stake. The European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet is the most consequential piece of infrastructure Europe will build this decade, and it is a transformational opportunity far more than a regulatory constraint.
From identification to verification
The importance of the EUDI Wallet does not lie in simply producing a digital duplicate of an identity document on a smartphone. It is that it changes what we are asked to prove. Today, identity systems work by identification: you reveal who you are, and the other party infers whether you qualify. The Wallet works by verification: you prove the specific fact that matters, and nothing more. Two mechanisms make this possible. Selective disclosure allows a citizen to share a single attribute from a credential rather than the whole document. Zero-knowledge proof goes further still, allowing someone to prove a fact — that they are of age, licensed, certified or authorised — without revealing the underlying data at all.
The consequences are more profound than they first appear. The system no longer holds the data; the individual does. The service no longer verifies the person; the person proves the fact. Control shifts to the citizen, and the volume of personal data circulating through the economy falls sharply. Crucially, the credentials stored in the Wallet remain under the user’s control. Citizens determine when, how and with whom their personal information is shared. Before attributes are presented to a service provider, the Wallet requires the user’s explicit approval, ensuring transparency and control over every data-sharing interaction. The Wallet supports a privacy-by-design approach by limiting disclosure to only the data required for a given service, reducing unnecessary exposure of personal information.
Dissolving a false trade-off
For two decades, digital services have been designed around an assumption: that security, privacy and performance pull against one another. Until now, more security meant more friction. More privacy meant less convenience. A better user experience meant collecting more data.
The Wallet dissolves that equation rather than balancing it. Fluidity and security stop being competing objectives: a credential that has been certified upstream by a trusted authority can be verified instantly, in person or remotely, without a manual review. Data that is never transmitted cannot be breached, leaked or misused. A verification that takes seconds rather than days removes precisely the friction at which customers give up.
Less data disclosed. Stronger assurance. Faster transactions. This is the promise of the EUDI Wallet: three objectives that used to compete now moving in the same direction.
Where the growth comes from
The opportunity is there. Verified bank account and employment information. Driving licences and diplomas. Qualified electronic signatures for contracts that today still require paper or a physical meeting. Confirmation that a person is authorised to act on behalf of someone else, or on behalf of a company.
For businesses, this means lower verification costs, faster onboarding of customers and employees alike, stronger authentication and fewer abandoned journeys. A new joiner's qualifications, right to work and professional certifications can be verified on the first day rather than over the first month. For sensitive and complex infrastructures — energy, transport, health, defence supply chains — professional credentials carried by the individual mean secure access and circulation without the administrative burden that currently accompanies it. In time, the same model extends to business wallets that simplify transactions between companies and public authorities.
And for the single market, the prize is larger still. A company should be able to establish a subsidiary in another Member State without reassembling the same documentation from scratch. Trusted, portable, verifiable credentials are how the single market finally works at digital speed.
This is also where digital sovereignty becomes tangible. By anchoring these exchanges in European law, European standards and European identity infrastructure, we define our own model of digital trust — one that combines interoperability with privacy, and innovation with democratic control. It could become not merely a new channel for accessing services, but a foundational layer of Europe’s digital future- and a model for nations’ digital sovereignty. Governments across Africa, Asia and Latin America are building digital identity systems today, and the principles behind the Wallet — verification over identification, credentials carried by the individual — can be replicated well beyond Europe. That value travels only with the principles attached — proportionality, user control, data protection — and not with the technology alone; a Wallet built without them would be a different model wearing the same name.
Availability is not yet adoption
None of this happens automatically. Launching a Wallet is a milestone; it is not the objective. The measure of success is likely to be whether citizens activate it and use it regularly, and whether public authorities and private organisations build it into the services people rely on.
We build these systems at IN Groupe — enrolment, credential issuance, cryptography, lifecycle management. In relation to the EUDI Wallet, our work currently supports Wallet and credential pilots for public and private issuers in several Member States, including through European large-scale pilot consortia. That work teaches something no regulation can mandate: trust is won or lost in the moments where the system meets the citizen. Four conditions are likely to shape the outcome.
The first is enrolment. Member States are starting from very different positions. If activating the Wallet or obtaining identification data proves complicated, many users risk disengaging before ever experiencing the benefit. Onboarding that is simple, reliable and accessible from the first attempt would remove much of that risk.
The second is inclusion. Citizens have very different levels of digital confidence and access to technology. Support, alternative channels and delegation — the ability for a carer, a relative or a guardian to act on someone's behalf — matter here: without them, digitalisation risks creating new barriers precisely for those who can least afford them.
The third is recourse. Systems fail: data is recorded incorrectly, a credential stops working, an attribute falls out of date, a device is lost. What sustains trust is not the absence of error but the ease of correcting it. Redress mechanisms — a clear route to challenge and fix incorrect data, and to recover a Wallet that is lost or compromised — work best when they are designed into the infrastructure from the outset.
The fourth is the ecosystem, and it may be the hardest. Adoption will be the true measure of success. Businesses are likely to hesitate before investing until they see a critical mass of users, while citizens may hesitate until the Wallet is embedded in services that deliver immediate, visible value. Breaking that deadlock is where governments are best placed to act — by making high-value public services wallet-enabled from day one, and by working with banks, telecommunications operators, transport providers and platforms so that a citizen who activates their Wallet finds something worth doing with it that same week. That means governments must do more than release an application, i.e. addressing the collaborative model required to issue and maintain credentials — an infrastructure that will not sustain itself on initial public funding alone. Governments will need to educate and encourage citizens to use services that are secure, interoperable and genuinely useful.
The regulatory framework has created the opportunity. The technology is ready. What remains is the harder, more valuable work: building services that citizens choose to use.
Europe has legislated trust. Now we must earn it — and the growth will follow.
Jacques Van Zijp is EVP Europe at IN Groupe, a global leader in secure identity and trust services.