EU publishes call for consultations on EUDI Wallet specifications

The European Union has issued a call for a public consultation on 12 new Implementing Acts, most of them focused on trust services for the EU Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet.

The consultation kicked off on April 15th  and will be open until May 13th, 2025.

The Implementing Acts provide technical and legal specifications for the creation of EUDI Wallets and will shape the development of the European Digital Identity Framework. The current Acts cover questions related to electronic signatures, seals and timestamps, qualified electronic registered delivery services, annual reports from supervisory bodies, peer reviews of electronic identification schemes and more.

The EU has previously published calls for feedback for Implementing Acts connected to core functionalities, certification and the trust ecosystem of the pan-European digital identity wallets.

How will the EUDI wallet affect banking and payments

The EU is looking at a tight deadline for implementing its digital identity solution. Member states are required to make a digital identity wallet available to citizens, residents, and businesses by November 2026 at the latest. Among the stakeholders that will be required to accept the EUDI Wallet are public administration and regulated industries such as banking, which will have until December 2027 to complete the process.

According to the latest statistics, 80 percent of financial institutions rely on document-based verification, according to Viky Manaila, trust services director at Intesi Group. The certification authority became a service provider and manager for Italy’s digital identity system last year.

Most companies are struggling to detect AI-generated documents with synthetic identity fraud, causing annual losses between US$20 billion and $40 billion, Manaila said during a webinar discussing the EUDI wallet’s impact on the financial sector, organized by Intesi Group and digital wallet maker iGrant.

“The EUDI wallet truly has the potential to disrupt customer risk management and fraud,” she says.

Intesi Group is part of the EUDI Wallet Consortium (EWC), which has been participating in the EUDI Wallet large-scale pilots alongside iGrant. At the beginning of the year, iGrant announced a successful implementation of EUDI wallet-based payments, achieved through collaboration in the EWC Payment Task Force led by Visa.

Lal Chandran, iGrant’s co-founder and chief technology officer, detailed the technical side of the achievement during the webinar, including leveraging EWC’s FC007 and RFC008 specifications.

“Once the individual has linked their EUDI wallet with their bank account and obtained the proof, they can use this proof in every subsequent transaction, for example, payments,” says Chandran.

The implementation has set a foundation for upcoming payment trials in the consortium’s large-scale pilots. The consortium, however, will still need to improve the user experience and go through many optimizations, including optimizing direct payments from bank accounts to merchants, he adds.

Article Topics

digital identity  |  digital wallets  |  EU  |  EU Digital Identity Wallet  |  EU Digital Identity Wallet Consortium (EWC)  |  European Digital Identity Framework  |  financial services  |  iGrant  |  Intesi Group