EU Continues Testing Digital Identity Wallets

The European Union (EU) is getting closer to rolling out its digital identity wallet.

As the European Commission (EC) noted on its website recently, the wallet “will be a secure and easy way for European citizens, residents and businesses to prove who they are when accessing digital services,” letting them “safely obtain, store and share important digital documents about yourself and electronically sign or seal documents.”

The wallets, the website noted, will make it easier to safely provide documents to open a bank account, enroll in school overseas or apply for jobs.

The program comes in the wake of Europe’s Digital Identity Regulation, which came into force in May 2024, and is designed to “enable the digital transformation of the public sector, allowing for more services to be accessed digitally, including across borders.”

In the meantime, the EC has been conducting pilot programs — set to wrap up next year — that explore the various use cases for the wallets. These include payments, as the wallets are designed to offer users a single way to identify themselves to all your bank accounts and authorize transactions.

The EC’s efforts are happening at a moment when the intertwined future of biometrics and digital identity has begun to transform payments, as noted here earlier this month.

“As digital wallets increasingly gain traction, the security features driving their use are emerging as components shaping the future of both commerce and authentication,” that report said.

“With the European Union’s eIDAS 2.0 (electronic identification, authentication and trust services) regulation 2026 compliance deadline approaching, using the intersection of digital ID and biometrics to provide enhanced security, improved user experiences and greater fraud prevention is top of mind for the payments industry.”

Research from the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Digital Bill Payments: Mobile Wallets Gain Popularity, but Hurdles Remain” found that 60% of consumers used mobile wallets to pay their bills in 2023, up 22% from the year before.

“With the world that we live in, digital identities are becoming more used than physical driver’s licenses or physical passports,” ACI Worldwide Global Fraud Prevention Risk Services Vice President Erika Dietrich told PYMNTS in September.

Still, for biometric-enabled digital IDs — and the wallets holding them — to gain broad acceptance, complex standards must be introduced that ensure interoperability and trust, PYMNTS wrote.

“Biometric authentication, while it exists for other aspects of our lives, is not a huge thing at this stage for payments — but as far as payments goes, it is the future,” Marc Hopkins, vice president at E-Complish, said in an interview here last month.