Brussels wants your ID, your diploma and your income statement in one app by 24 December
The EU regulation gives every member state 24 months from the implementing acts to provide at least one European Digital Identity Wallet, which puts the deadline at 24 December 2026. The source code has to be open, and you choose what you hand over.
There is a date in the European calendar almost nobody has circled, and it changes how you prove who you are. The regulation that rewrote eIDAS says each member state shall provide at least one European Digital Identity Wallet within 24 months of the implementing acts entering into force. Run the clock and it lands on 24 December 2026.
Article 5a states the aim plainly: everyone in the Union should have secure, trusted, cross-border access to public and private services while keeping full control over their data. At the counter, that means the digital document that opens a bank account in Lisbon has to work when you hire a car in Naples.
What the wallet holds
Person identification data and electronic attestations of attributes — a driving licence, a degree certificate, proof of income, a professional qualification. The law requires that the user can request, obtain, select, combine, store, delete, share and present those items under their sole control.
Select is the word doing the heavy lifting. Today, proving you are over 18 usually means handing over a card that also gives up your address, your parents’ names and your ID number. The wallet is designed to answer only the question that was asked.
Three ways to comply, and the code has to be open
The regulation does not force governments to build the app themselves. It allows three routes: provided directly by a member state, provided under a mandate from one, or provided independently of a state but recognised by it. Some countries are building their own; others will certify someone else’s.
One requirement runs through all three. The source code of the wallet’s application software components must be open-source licensed, with a narrow, justified carve-out for components that do not sit on the user’s device. That is an unusual thing to write into a regulation, and it is the answer to the obvious question from anyone suspicious: who gets to audit the app your identity lives in.
Portugal has had Chave Móvel Digital for years, so authenticating with a phone is not new here. The European wallet is a different animal, and the difference is in the word European — the point is being accepted abroad. Worth watching closely, in the same way it was worth reading what EU law says about the games you buy and the bill to hand each document to the state only once.
By Oliver Grant
Image: European Commission / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
