OOTS can provide EU Digital Identity Wallets’ shortcut to secure data exchange

The European Union’s Digital Identity Wallet project that promises to make transactions between people and businesses in different member states easy in ambitious enough without reinventing the wheel. The “wheel,” in this case, is the infrastructure for secure data exchanges, and it has already been invented for national-level use by the Once-Only Technical System (OOTS).

This is the perspective shared by two officials from the Austrian delegation to the sixth OOTS Projectathon. The event was held last month in Brussels, Belgium.

Austria Secure Information Technology Center Director Herbert Leitold and Federal Chancellery Program Manager – Directorate-General VII “Digitalization and eGovernment” Felix Plank are working on synergies between OOTS and the EU Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet initiative. Both are members of the OOTS & EUDI Wallet Synergies and Interoperability Contact Group.

The OOTS infrastructure went live in December 2023 to streamline administrative processes and support cross-border interactions between EU country authorities.

The OOTS Common Services can reduce the cost and speed up time to market for EUDI Wallets, Leitold says in a video sharing insights from the event.

Austria has proposed an “eDelivery network” as a data-agnostic transport layer for the authoritative data being shared. The system would be governed by a trust framework.

The country is planning to build the OOTS infrastructure into its EUDI Wallet, and Leitold notes that the Dutch delegation said similar discussions are happening in the Netherlands.

The group is planning further pilots and demonstrations to identify more possible synergies between the two systems.

One feature of the OOTS that could benefit EUDI Wallets, Leitold says, is the preview space. While OOTS delivers data on-demand, the EUDI Wallet works on the basis of the user having anticipated what credentials they need to share, and stored them in the wallet. In the case of credentials they discover they need to share while carrying out a transaction, a preview space feature of OOTS could be used to help them select and save the right credential.

“Why not simply use the preview space, where the user, the citizen, sees that diploma, and just have a tiny little button saying, well, store it in the wallet for future use,” Leitold explains as an example. “That, for me, makes perfect sense for the citizen, to improve the process.”

A new batch of implementing acts for the EUDI Wallet were released for feedback at the end of June.

Article Topics

cross-border data sharing  |  digital ID  |  digital wallets  |  EU Digital Identity Wallet  |  Once-Only Technical System (OOTS)