The vision for the European Digital Identity, a personal digital wallet for EU citizens and residents that they can use for identify themselves across the EU, is dependent on the achievement of interoperability. A solution is interoperable if it can operate successfully and seamlessly with solutions built by different companies, providers or governments. In the case of EUDI it means that digital identity wallets need to be able to accept credentials ((Q)EAAs) and information requests from any party within the EU, not a small task.
To achieve interoperability the EU Commission has taken several steps. Fist, the Architecture Reference Framework (ARF) was defined, in which a technical base is defined to implement the legislation defined in eIDAS 2. Second, the EU Commission provided a common toolbox for parties to use in their development and testing. In addition to this technical baseline, and to make the step to practical interoperability testing, several Large Scale Pilots were defined and funded.
The Large Scale Pilots were selected by the European Commission to test drive the specifications of EU Digital Identity Wallets. The four consortia (consisting of more than 350 private companies and public authorities across 26 Member States, as well as Norway, Iceland, and Ukraine) are making sure that a wide range of use cases are explored and tested, before the EUDI rollout will take place in all member states. This means defining the user flows, credential attributes, and coming together with all stakeholders to work out the end-to-end proces for all parties involved. A large part of this is interoperability testing as countries, and the relying parties they work with, are building their own implementations that will have to be shown to work in cross-border testing.
The four Large Scale Pilots are:
- POTENTIAL
- The EU Digital Wallet Consortium (EWC)
- NOBID Consortium
- Digital Credentials for Europe (DC4EU)
They are active in different use cases, member states, and sometimes even implementation choices. But in total the sheer amount of testing in real-life use cases with real-life stakeholders is bound to result in improved insights into EUDI adoption.
Paradym x EUDI
Paradym is ensuring compliance and interoperability in several ways. We're closely aligning with the Architecture Reference Framework, working on interoperability with the tools provided by the EU Commission like the reference implementation, and we're working with the POTENTIAL Large Scale Pilot with our EUDI Wallet Prototype. Potential is a consortium of 19 European member states and Ukraine, with more than 140 public and private partners. they are working on six use cases in total:
- UC1: eGovernment Services
- UC2: Bank Account Opening
- UC3: SIM Card Registration
- UC4: Mobile Driving License
- UC5: Qualified eSignature
- UC6: ePrescription
In Stage 1 and 2 of building the most trustworthy, user-friendly, and universally applicable European Digital Identity Wallet for the German Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation (SPRIND), we mostly focused on building the actual EUDI Wallet (see our results here. Now that we’ve entered Stage 3, one of the most exciting things we get to do is test our wallet with the actual stakeholders leading the way with adoption. We're involved in the use cases: Bank Account Opening, SIM Card Registration, Mobile Driving License, Qualified eSignature, and ePrescription. We're both testing our existing wallet, and tackling innovation topics that are relevant to specific use cases.
The Paradym EUDI Wallet Prototype is tested at the Potential interoperability test events with all participating member states. By extension we're making sure the Paradym issuer and verifier platform are also interoperable. At the current moment Paradym is shown to be interoperable with 7 EU Member States, a number that will only increase as our efforts progress.
Through our work to closely follow the ARF, and our work on interoperability both within and outside the Potential consortium, we're making sure that your choice to build on Paradym now means you are ahead of the curve in terms of usability and interoperability.
