eIDAS 2: The great digital identity revolution is (finally) here

Some regulations make a lot of noise without really changing practices. Others, quietly, are redrawing the rules of the game. eIDAS 2 clearly belongs to the second category.

For compliance, KYC, and onboarding professionals, this is a major turning point. Here's what you need to know.

What is a digital identity wallet and why does it change everything?

A digital identity wallet is an application on your phone that stores verified attestations about you: your civil identity, your driver's license, your diploma, your status as a healthcare professional. No passport scanning, no lengthy forms. You present a specific attribute directly from your smartphone, with legal evidentiary value recognized by law.

eIDAS 2 - definitively adopted by the EU in 2024, with implementation expected by 2026–2027 - requires each Member State to offer its citizens an interoperable, EU-wide identity wallet: the EUDIW (European Union Digital Identity Wallet).

But the market isn't limited to the public sector. Private players such as banks, fintechs, telecoms operators will be able to issue their own wallets, subject to certification. Two families will emerge: public wallets (state-issued, such as FranceConnect+ or the future French national wallet) and private wallets (eIDAS-certified trusted third parties). Both will coexist. Both will be accepted in verification workflows.

Who is affected, and on what timeline?

The short answer: everyone running onboarding of natural persons in a regulated context.

Banks, insurers, fintechs, crypto-asset platforms, payment service providers… If you have a KYC process, eIDAS 2 directly concerns you. The regulation creates a legal framework in which presenting attributes from a wallet is recognized as a means of identity verification with the same legal weight as a physical ID document.

On the timeline: the regulation is already in force. Member States have until end of 2026 to deploy their national wallets. Large platforms (>500K users in the EU) will be required to accept them. For others, the obligation will phase in progressively.

The window to get ahead of this is closing fast.

The concrete impact on onboarding and KYB

The most immediate effect of eIDAS 2 plays out on the natural persons side. The classic onboarding journey (ID document upload, selfie, liveness check) will now coexist with a new channel: attribute presentation from a certified wallet.

In France, the first building blocks are already in place. FranceConnect+ now enables identification at a high Level of Assurance (LoA High). La Poste Identité Numérique offers an eIDAS-certified wallet at the substantial assurance level. This isn't science fiction, it's in production.

In practical terms, for your compliance teams, this means revisiting the accepted verification measures in your AML/CFT procedures. EBA guidelines and national positions (such as the ACPR in France) are beginning to integrate this reality. The question is no longer "should we accept wallets?" but "how do we integrate them into our decision-making workflows?"

On the KYB (legal entities) side, however, we're still in a blind spot. Business wallets don't yet exist within the current eIDAS 2 framework ; more on that below.

The real challenge: orchestrating multi-modality

What eIDAS 2 quietly reveals is this: the future of identity verification is not a single channel, it's the coexistence of multiple modalities.

eIDAS wallet. Traditional document verification. Liveness check. Open banking. Third-party data (registries, official databases). Depending on the user, the risk level, and the country, the right channel will not be the same.

This is precisely where the real challenge lies for compliance teams: not building a rigid integration toward one specific wallet, but equipping themselves with an infrastructure capable of centralizing and orchestrating these different verification sources in a seamless, consistent, and auditable way.

That's the approach we've taken at Ondorse from day one: a platform that orchestrates verifications, regardless of their source, so they fit into an intelligent decision-making workflow. eIDAS 2 doesn't change that conviction. It confirms it.

The open question: what about businesses?

eIDAS 2 made a clear choice: the priority is natural persons. The EUDIW is a citizen wallet.

But the next real frontier is the digital identity of legal entities. Imagine: a certified business registry, verified attributes (beneficial owners, legal statuses, sector-specific certifications) presentable from a business wallet, accepted as a matter of right in a KYB workflow.

It's not in the regulation yet. But discussions at the European level are progressing. And the players who have built the right orchestration foundations today will be the ones who absorb this next wave without friction.

The question isn't if it will happen. It's when and whether you'll be ready.