The EUDI Wallet brings real, everyday benefits to citizens across Europe. It lets you store your identity documents, credentials, and personal data in one secure app on your phone, so you can prove who you are, share only what is needed, and access services without carrying physical documents or filling in the same forms repeatedly. The sections below answer the most common questions citizens have about how the wallet works, what it protects, and who controls it.
How will the EUDI Wallet change daily life in Europe?
The European Digital Identity Wallet will make everyday digital and physical interactions significantly easier and faster. Instead of carrying a wallet full of cards, logging into dozens of separate accounts, or scanning and uploading documents repeatedly, citizens will be able to do all of this from a single app on their smartphone. The change is about giving people a reliable, secure, and universally accepted way to interact with both public and private services across Europe.
The practical impact covers a wide range of situations that most people encounter regularly. Based on the large-scale pilots that tested the wallet across EU Member States, the following use cases were developed and refined:
- Accessing government services such as filing taxes, applying for permits, or checking social security benefits
- Opening a bank account online without having to resubmit identity documents
- Presenting a mobile driving licence during a roadside check or when renting a car
- Signing contracts digitally, without printing or scanning paper
- Collecting a prescription at a pharmacy by sharing only the relevant medical details
- Proving educational qualifications when applying for a job or a course
Under eIDAS 2.0, which amends Regulation (EU) 910/2014 through Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, EU Member States are legally required to make a wallet available to every citizen, resident, and business by 24 December 2026. That legal deadline is the date by which Member States must fulfil their wallet obligations. Practical interoperability, national certification, and the rollout of specific use cases will develop in phases beyond that date. The EUDI Wallet is already in active development, and its impact on how people interact with services will be substantial as the ecosystem matures.
What personal data does the EUDI Wallet store and share?
The EUDI Wallet can store a wide range of verified personal data, including your national identity, driving licence, passport details, European Health Insurance Card, educational certificates, and social security information. The wallet does not share everything at once. You choose exactly which data to share, with whom, and for what purpose, every single time.
Think of the wallet as a secure digital envelope for your credentials and attestations. When a service asks you to prove your identity, the wallet does not hand over your entire profile. It shares only the specific attributes that are needed. If a website needs to confirm you are over 18, the wallet can confirm that fact through selective disclosure of the relevant attribute, such as an “age over 18” confirmation, without revealing your date of birth, address, or any other detail. Selective disclosure is built into the design of the wallet from the ground up.
Over time, the wallet is expected to hold an expanding set of attestations, from professional qualifications and organisational roles to payment verification data and travel documents. The goal is to make the wallet a single, trusted source of verified information that eliminates the need to repeatedly provide the same data to different organisations.
How does the EUDI Wallet protect citizen privacy?
The EUDI Wallet is built around a privacy-by-design principle, meaning privacy protection is a core requirement. Citizens retain full control over their data. The wallet is designed to prevent the creation of a surveillance trail across different transactions, and no single central authority operationally manages all EUDI Wallets or can track which services you use or what data you share.
Several design choices reinforce this privacy protection. Your data is stored on your own device, within the Wallet Secure Cryptographic Device that forms part of your wallet unit, rather than on a central server that could be accessed or breached. When you share an attribute with a relying party, that transaction is limited to what is strictly necessary. Relying parties cannot request more information than they are registered to receive, and they are not permitted to combine data from different interactions to build a profile of you.
The legal foundation for these protections comes from eIDAS 2.0, Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, which sets binding requirements for wallet providers across Europe. The European Commission manages the legal framework and adopts the implementing acts that contain those binding requirements. EU Member States are responsible for providing or mandating wallet solutions, certifying and notifying them, and supervising actors within their jurisdiction. The Architecture and Reference Framework provides the technical elaboration of those requirements. Together, these layers mean that every wallet issued in any EU country must meet the same high privacy standards. Citizens can therefore rely on consistent privacy guarantees, whether they are using the wallet in their home country or abroad.
Can the EUDI Wallet be used in other EU countries?
Cross-border use is one of the most important goals of the European Digital Identity Wallet. The eIDAS 2.0 framework is designed so that a certified wallet from one Member State can be used with an appropriate relying party in another Member State. This is a legal requirement, not a voluntary feature.
In practice, this means a citizen from Portugal can use their EUDI Wallet to access services in Germany, a student from Finland can present their diploma digitally when applying for a position in France, and a traveller from Italy can present digital travel credentials that were piloted under the EWC large-scale pilot. The wallet removes much of the friction that currently comes with cross-border identity verification, where different national systems often do not recognise each other.
It is important to understand what cross-border interoperability does and does not cover. Interoperability operates at the European level for certified wallet credentials, but national registration requirements, sector-specific legislation, and the legal consequences of particular credentials in a given country remain governed by national or sector rules. Relying parties must register under CIR (EU) 2025/848, adopted on 6 May 2025, with the national authority of their Member State of establishment before they can request wallet data, and that registration remains connected to the applicable national framework. The large-scale pilots that ran across Europe specifically tested this interoperability, and their results fed directly into the final technical standards. Practical cross-border functionality will develop in phases as national rollouts mature and relying parties complete their integration.
Is the EUDI Wallet safe from fraud and identity theft?
The EUDI Wallet uses strong cryptographic security to protect against fraud and identity theft. Every attestation stored in the wallet is cryptographically signed by the issuing authority, which means it is tamper-evident: any alteration can be detected. When you present an attestation, the receiving relying party can carry out a set of verification checks against it.
Verification involves more than a single cryptographic check. A relying party verifies the issuer’s signature against the relevant national trusted list, which is part of the EU List of Trusted Lists. The relying party also checks the revocation status of the attestation using the status information provided by the issuer, and checks the wallet unit attestation to confirm that the presenting wallet is running on a certified wallet solution. The signature check can take place offline, but the revocation and wallet unit attestation checks require a connection.
This is a meaningful improvement over physical documents and self-reported information. A paper certificate can be copied or altered. A PDF sent by email carries no guaranteed integrity. An attestation in the EUDI Wallet, by contrast, carries a verifiable digital signature that makes any tampering detectable.
Access to the wallet itself is protected by strong authentication, typically a PIN combined with biometric verification on your device. If your phone is lost or stolen, the credentials inside cannot be accessed without your authentication. Private keys for Person Identification Data and attestations are held within the Wallet Secure Cryptographic Device and never leave it. If you move to a new device, attestations are reissued rather than copied, which means there is no transfer of key material that could be intercepted.
Who decides when and how the EUDI Wallet is used?
The citizen decides. The EUDI Wallet operates on the principle of user control. Every time a relying party requests access to your data, you receive a clear request that shows exactly what is being asked for and why. You can approve, decline, or share only a subset of the requested information. Nothing is shared automatically or without your explicit action. Approving a data request in the wallet is a separate matter from consent as a legal basis under the GDPR: the relying party must have its own lawful basis for processing the data it receives.
This control extends to the level of individual data attributes. You are not required to share a full identity document when only one piece of information is needed. If a service only needs to know your country of residence, you share that and nothing more. This granular control makes the wallet genuinely different from many current identity systems, where accepting a login often means handing over far more data than the service actually needs.
Governance of the EUDI Wallet is a shared responsibility. The European Commission manages the legal framework and adopts implementing acts. EU Member States provide or mandate wallet solutions, certify and notify them, and supervise actors within their jurisdiction. The European Digital Identity Cooperation Group supports cross-border alignment and cooperation. National competent authorities and registrars, wallet providers, issuers of Person Identification Data and attestations, qualified trust service providers, and relying parties each carry defined obligations within this framework. All of these actors are bound by the rules set out in eIDAS 2.0. They cannot override your choices or use your data for purposes beyond what you agreed to. The regulatory framework is designed to ensure that control over personal data stays with the person it belongs to.
How TrustTech helps organisations prepare for the EUDI Wallet
While the EUDI Wallet delivers clear benefits to citizens, organisations face a real challenge in adapting their systems, processes, and compliance frameworks to support it. Public bodies must be ready to accept notified wallets for online services requiring electronic identification by 24 December 2026. For regulated private sectors, including financial services, healthcare, telecoms, energy, and transport, the obligation under Article 5f of eIDAS 2.0 applies from 24 December 2027, where strong user authentication is legally or contractually required. Very large online platforms are subject to a separate provision under Article 5f, which applies where the platform requires user authentication, on the voluntary request of the user and for the minimum necessary data. Given that national rollouts and relying-party acceptance will develop in phases, organisations should begin preparing now.
The ID Connector is an integration that lets relying parties accept every certified European wallet, whatever Member State issued it, for identification, login and qualified signing. EUDI Wallet acceptance comes first; the same interface also carries other IDs, such as national eIDs, bank IDs and identity documents, inside and outside the EU.
Specifically, the ID Connector supports organisations with:
- Accepting every certified EUDI Wallet, regardless of the issuing Member State, through a single integration point
- Managing trust against national trusted lists and the EU List of Trusted Lists, including revocation checks and wallet unit attestation validation
- Enforcing the registered attribute scope so that only the data a relying party is registered to request under CIR (EU) 2025/848 is ever exchanged
- Supporting qualified signing through a connected qualified trust service provider
- Connecting other identity means, including national eIDs, bank IDs, and identity documents, through the same interface
Organisations in financial services, government, and healthcare are already working with TrustTech on EUDI Wallet acceptance. To see how the ID Connector fits your situation, explore our digital identity solutions or contact our team.