This article focuses on the strategic value and benefits of he EBW and is the first of the four-part analysis on the topic.
For the rest of articles, you can visit:
Europe is entering a pivotal stage in its digital transformation, moving beyond digitising documents and portals toward trusted, interoperable, cross-border data ecosystems. The proposed European Business Wallet (EBW) is positioned as a foundational element of that shift.
Where the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI Wallet) empowers natural persons, the EBW extends trust infrastructure to legal entities, public sector bodies, and increasingly, automated actors within industrial value chains. It aims to enable secure organisational identification, representation rights, verifiable attestations, regulatory reporting, and trusted digital communications with legal effect across the Digital Single Market.
The EBW has the potential to become a digital trust substrate for economic activity, unlocking capabilities such as:
This positions the EBW as an essential component of Europe’s competitiveness strategy, particularly as industries shift from document-based workflows to machine-validated, data-rich transactions. The Draghi and Letta reports stressed that fragmentation, redundant reporting obligations, and differing national infrastructures constrain EU productivity and scale. The EBW directly addresses these challenges by providing a harmonised, reusable trust layer for organisational interactions.
However, the EBW’s potential impact extends beyond reducing paperwork. Applied in industrial contexts, the wallet can support:
The EBW proposal emerged mainly due to three structural pressures:
Compliance consumes disproportionate time and financial resources, especially for SMEs. Fragmentation in digital public services and registry systems creates uneven access to cross-border markets.
Economic workflows increasingly rely on structured attestations that can be validated automatically rather than stored in static PDFs.
To reduce dependencies on global platforms and infrastructure providers, Europe needs trusted identity and data-exchange mechanisms under EU governance.
The EBW complements major regulatory and digital initiatives, including:
The EBW acts as the binding tissue between these initiatives, giving them a shared authentication and verification layer.
The EBW is designed as a market-driven, technology-neutral framework. Its success depends on:
Together, these frameworks are converging into a shared identity infrastructure: a world where a Qualified Electronic Attestation of Attributes (QEAA) issued under eIDAS could also satisfy AML verification requirements.
That means onboarding no longer starts with “collect documents” but with “verify attributes” in a secure, digital, and user-controlled way.
The EUDIW isn’t just a new identity tool; it’s a potential compliance accelerator. With the right architecture, wallets can:
If implemented rigorously, the EBW can help Europe transition from fragmented digital portals to a cohesive trust-centric market infrastructure. But if executed narrowly, focused only on administrative simplification, it risks becoming yet another siloed regulatory artefact.
This series of articles therefore explore not only features and benefits, but also structural risks, adoption challenges, and design implications, so that policymakers, enterprises, and technology providers can approach implementation critically and strategically.
The EBW is frequently described as a way to reduce paperwork and streamline compliance. While accurate, this framing misses its broader economic and technological significance.
The EBW is better understood as a trust and data-exchange layer for Europe’s digital economy, enabling authenticated, structured, machine-verifiable data flows across companies, devices, regulators, and supply chains. Its value manifests differently across stakeholder groups: businesses, public administrations, and the broader digital trust ecosystem.
Below, we explore the strategic benefits across these dimensions.
Today, companies, especially SMEs, expend disproportionate effort repeatedly providing the same information across borders: business registrations, beneficial ownership, VAT, conformity documentation, licensing, ESG proofs, and more. Each process involves redundant submissions, manual checks, notarisation, and inconsistent data formats.
The EBW changes the execution model: instead of transmitting documents, companies present cryptographically verifiable attestations, allowing regulators, suppliers, banks, and auditors to validate data instantly and automatically.
This shifts compliance from a labour-intensive activity to a workflow embedded in digital systems, enabling:
Businesses operating across jurisdictions face delays when establishing entities, securing licenses, or interacting with public authorities. The EBW allows organisations to:
This reduces friction in activities such as procurement, market entry, fiscal registration, and customs compliance.
The impact is most profound for high-growth firms whose marginal expansion cost drops as repeat legal onboarding disappears.
Businesses rarely act as monoliths; responsibility is distributed across employees, contractors, subsidiaries, and service providers. Today, proof of authority is often based on static PDFs, organisational charts, or notarised mandates.
Roles like Digital Trust Engineer, Identity Proofing Specialist, and Qualified Trust Services Manager will need to understand how eIDAS frameworks interact with AMLR and national supervisory regimes.
Training, credentialing, and cross-border recognition of these roles will be vital to scaling this ecosystem.
The EBW enables dynamic, revocable, digitally enforceable delegation, supporting:
This is essential for remote operations, multilateral supply chains, and regulated industries.
Beyond administrative workflows, the EBW enables credential exchange between machines, logistics actors, and digital platforms. In manufacturing and circular economy contexts, this supports:
Instead of verifying organisations only at contract signature, wallets allow continuous verification throughout the product lifecycle, strengthening trust in complex value chains.
EBW adoption may create differentiation through:
Companies that adopt early may gain operational advantages, shaping sector standards rather than reacting to them.
Public authorities spend significant resources checking the legitimacy of companies and their representatives. Today, this often involves:
With EBW, authorities receive tamper-evident attestations issued by authoritative sources, reducing manual review and fraud risk while improving auditability. This increases confidence in compliance while lowering cost.
Digitalisation maturity varies across Member States. The EBW provides a harmonised interface without enforcing identical national infrastructures. This can enable:
It supports the shift towards digital-by-default services, aligned with EU strategic targets.
Machine-verifiable data enables:
This supports evidence-based governance while reducing administrative burden.
The EBW does not introduce a monolithic system. Its architecture depends on a market of:
This creates a broader and more diversified demand for trust infrastructure, extending beyond personal identity to organisational and industrial identity. It is also an enabler for the following capabilities:
| Capability | Expected Impact |
|---|---|
| Qualified Electronic Seals & Signatures | Used in operational workflows rather than document approvals |
| Electronic Registered Delivery Services | Replaces email for official B2B communications |
| Verifiable Credentials/(Q)EEAs | Creates structured, machine-readable, cryptgraphically-provable attestations |
| Secure Cryptographic Devices | Needed for key protection in industrial deployments |
| Autonomous Machine Identity | Enables secure interactions beyond human actors |
The EBW strengthens the economic case for pan-European trust services and reduces dependency on foreign infrastructure providers, provided that procurement and architecture choices align with sovereignty goals.
The EBW should not be seen as an extension of identity wallets, but as a bridge between legal identity, compliance infrastructure, and digital economic activity.
Where today’s systems confirm who a business is, the EBW confirms:
Without a robust legal-person identity layer, EU cannot reliably enforce sovereignty principles, (e.g. jurisdictional control of data, accountability of economic actors, and trust in cross-border transactions) at scale.
The EBW therefore has the capacity to function not only as a compliance tool, but as a cornerstone of EU’s sovereign digital infrastructure.
Having read about the EBW's formulation forces, framing and values, you can now dive deeper to the second part of the EBW analysis article series, examining the risks, barriers, and limitations of the EBW's adoption.
