EUDI Wallet provides baseline target for standards to enable agentic commerce

A new non-paper from the WE BUILD Consortium offers a policy vision for Europe’s chance to build a trusted identity layer for AI agents. “Trusted Identities for AI Agents: An Opportunity for Europe” takes as its starting point the presumed transformation of the world by agentic AI. “By 2030, billions of AI agents will operate across borders,” it says. “The upside is significant, but does not come without risk. The rapid scaling of the use of AI agents requires a corresponding evolution in digital infrastructure.”

This is the challenge facing the identity and authentication ecosystem. The current work of organizations like WE BUILD and the FIDO Alliance points toward EUDI Wallets, verifiable credentials and delegated identity becoming the trust layer for agentic AI – and a necessary foundation for trust if agentic commerce is to reach its proclaimed potential.

Passkey progress provides roadmap

In a recent interview with Dock Labs, FIDO Alliance Executive Director and CEO Andrew Shikiar explains how the agentic shift has prompted FIDO to broaden its remit beyond passkeys to address ways to secure authentication for agentic transactions. In doing so, he provides a de facto technical and standards roadmap for how to successfully and smoothly transition trusted identity into the agentic ecosystem.

FIDO’s approach to passkeys has yielded one of the tech world’s security success stories. Working and collaborating across the industry, FIDO effectively packaged and produced the raw material of public-key cryptography into what we now recognize as the passkey, through a combination of standards, communications and design guidelines. In doing so, it has helped address the problem of phishing, and taken major steps toward its initial goal of freeing the world from the tyranny of the password.

Shikiar says that, for the passkey project, “we poured a lot of time and money and research into optimizing user experience and issuing user experience guidelines. We were acutely aware that everyone’s first passkey experience had to be a good one, so that they’d want to use them again.” FIDO’s “cookbook for how to roll out passkeys” helped relying parties with their learning curve, and directed the industry toward common repeatable user journeys that built confidence, awareness and demand for passkeys.

The win is not yet formally confirmed; recent data from FIDO and HID shows that passkey adoption is widespread but not yet mature, and tends to stall at scale, with 93 percent of organizations somewhere on the passkey adoption path, but only 13 percent having deployed passkeys at scale.

Europe serving as model for wallet, VC ecosystem 

With the passkey problem well in hand, the FIDO Alliance’s efforts are now focused on building a similar path for verifiable credentials. Shikiar speaks of giving verifiable credentials “a passkey moment,” by working to complement pre-existing foundational protocols with a certification program, a market program, consumer awareness, branding and other supports.

He is clear on FIDO’s role and core deliverable. “What we’re aiming to do here is not create specifications. Our core deliverable will be a certification program.”

Major projects worldwide are bringing digital credentials into popular use, from mDL schemes to the EUDI Wallet program in the EU. The latter is a major catalyst for verifiable credentials in the identity marketplace, and FIDO believes it can play its part in achieving interoperability and technical alignment. Shikiar says it will be looking to “ensure that a wallet correctly implements credential formats and presentation protocols from ISO, from OIDF from IETF and other groups,  so that an issuer or relying party can can trust that a credential can be stored, managed and consumed in the way it’s supposed to be irrespective of where the wallet resides.”

In effect, then, FIDO – like WE BUILD – is looking to Europe as a baseline for standards governing VCs, as digital identity and the agentic economy continue to develop globally. Major shifts driven by broad regulation are less likely to occur in the U.S., where opposition to such things is built into the structure of government – and Shikiar notes that, between the U.S. and EU models, an array of approaches may emerge; he points to India, Japan, Singapore and Australia as countries building strong digital identity ecosystems.

Regardless, “the need for interoperability is undebatable.” The trick now is in how to make the messaging resonate at the frequency of passkeys.

Trust layer will enable agentic authentication

The agentic frontier is still taking shape; Shikiar forecasts between 12 and 18 months as a timeline for agents to noticeably emerge into the consumer purchasing pipeline. Thus does agentic authentication become the next major identity obstacle: a key piece of a puzzle that includes complex questions about liability and authority on which the whole agentic commerce infrastructure depends.

Shikiar says “we’ve seen the analyst reports projecting, you know, billions or trillions of dollars in value in agentic commerce. None of that will happen unless we can implement a trust layer to allow agentic commerce to happen.”

With its wide-reaching membership and engagement with senior leadership, the FIDO Alliance is uniquely positioned to help the industry get where it intends to go. Major players like Google and Mastercard have contributed to FIDO’s agentic authentication working group and agentic payments technical working group, reflecting a shared commitment to giving the industry a strong foundation.

Standards transcend competition

“Ultimately, when I think about standards in general, I see them as kind of an act of collective commoditization, right?” Shikiar says. “Basically saying, there’s a layer of technology that doesn’t really have a competitive advantage to us alone and it’s better for us to all agree that this is kind of the value line that we’re all going to implement on top of.”

As with most matters of identity, Shikiar says, it all comes down to trust. Can FIDO and its peers help construct an agentic ecosystem that consumers understand, trust and want to use?

The answer is a moving target – for now. The identity market is shifting, molded by regulations, AI threats and opportunities, and the rapid advance of technology. Shikiar says that isn’t likely to slow down on its own account. “Everything is happening at agentic pace, agentic scale, which means fast and crazy and breaking things. But at the same time, we need to slow down and agree upon some primitives that will allow agentic commerce to actually move at agentic scale.”

Article Topics

agentic commerce  |  AI agents  |  biometric authentication  |  biometrics  |  EU Digital Identity Wallet  |  FIDO Alliance  |  passkeys  |  verifiable credentials  |  WE BUILD consortium