Some innovation projects start with a grand vision. Others start with a process so manually taxing that everyone involved quietly dreads the next peak period. In this builder spotlight, we speak to Nanda Haverkamp, project manager at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam), about how AUAS is using Paradym in the eduwallet pilot to issue and verify diploma supplements as verifiable credentials.
The Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences has a pretty impressive track record when it comes to digital identity innovation. From 2023 - 2025, they were an active consortium member in the DC4EU: Digital Credentials for Europe large scale pilot. A project that brought together 99 institutions from 25 countries to experiment hands-on with the implications of the new eIDAS 2.0 legislation to create an EU-wide interoperable digital identity. With their DC4EU partners, AUAS had already started testing how learners could share educational outcomes across borders in a more interoperable way. That early experience made one thing very clear: in digital identity for education, better interoperability is not a nice-to-have, it is a must. Education is by definition a cross-border use case, especially in the EU, as EU citizens have the right to study in any EU Member State under the same conditions as nationals.
Working across institutions and across countries means you immediately run into questions of governance, trust, and recognition. Who is allowed to issue what? How do you know an institution is legitimate? And how do you make this work in a way that still fits the reality of different national education systems?
So, when NPuls and SURF started their eduwallet initiative to match different Dutch educational institutions with different tech providers to test real-life educational use cases, AUAS immediately joined up to continue their experience from the DC4EU pilot in a hands-on setting.
For AUAS, the diploma supplement became the obvious place to start. It is a document that must be provided to students, but unlike the diploma itself, it does not depend on Dutch legal requirements around a so-called 'wet ink' signature. That made it a realistic candidate for digitization now, instead of someday later. It was also a smart operational choice. As Nanda explains, the current process of issuing the diploma supplement is full of repetitive manual handling: printing large batches, separating specific pages for signatures, recombining them with the diploma and transcript, and making sure the right documents end up in the right sets. For a batch of fifty diploma supplements, that process can take roughly 75 minutes, and that does not even include the coordination needed to handle signatures at busy times.
That combination of high effort and low strategic value is exactly what made the use case so compelling. The work is important, but much of it is simple assembly work that absorbs time from people whose expertise is better used elsewhere. By redesigning that process around verifiable credentials, HvA is not only experimenting with the future of digital identity, but also testing a very concrete way to save time, reduce errors, and improve the student experience.
What they’re building with Paradym
Within the eduwallet pilot, AUAS is using Paradym to issue a diploma supplement as a verifiable credential while keeping its own systems as the source of truth.
In the technical setup, Paradym connects to existing identity and data infrastructure from AUAS. The national eduID is used as the authorization layer so the student authenticates before receiving the credential. AUAS's own backend acts as the attribute provider that, based on the authenticated request, returns the diploma supplement data dynamically.
This means personal data does not need to be preloaded into Paradym. The credential is issued based on authenticated access and live institutional data, which makes the pilot both practical and aligned with how higher education systems already work.
One of the strongest signals from the pilot is that higher educational institutions do not have to throw away their current systems to work with verifiable credentials. In the AUAS demo flow, a student requests their diploma supplement, authenticates with eduID, and receives the credential in a wallet. Behind the scenes, Paradym handles the credential issuance flow, while AUAS continues to control the underlying records. It is a good example of how verifiable credentials can sit on top of existing infrastructure rather than compete with it.
For Nanda, the appeal is not just technical. What stands out most is the idea behind the model itself: giving people more control over their own digital data. In this case, that means students and alumni can receive and share their diploma supplement directly from a wallet instead of depending on paper documents, attachments, or institutional back-and-forth. That is especially relevant in education, where records often need to travel between institutions, employers, and countries long after a student has graduated.
The pilot is also helping AUAS answer a more organizational question: what will it actually take to implement this well? As the eIDAS 2.0 legislation is supposed to go into effect soon, requiring educational institutions to accept digital credentials, that is one of the main goals of participating so early. The team wants practical insight into the real costs, the technical changes required, and the process changes staff should expect when wallet-based credentials become part of mainstream education infrastructure. According to Nanda, that is also why the pilot is being tested with a broad group of colleagues and supported with demos across the organization. Building internal understanding is part of the work.
There is another benefit too. By mapping the diploma supplement into a wallet-ready format, the team has already uncovered opportunities to simplify the document itself. Comparing AUAS’s current supplement with other Dutch institutions and with European templates revealed short-term optimizations that have value regardless of the pilot outcome. That is often what good pilot work does: it does not just validate a future direction, it also improves the present process.
What makes AUAS’s role in the eduwallet pilot particularly interesting is the willingness to engage early, even in a period where education institutions are under pressure to do more with less. Joining a pilot like this takes time, budget, and internal energy. But that early effort gives the university of applied sciences room to learn before these changes become unavoidable at scale. Rather than waiting for digital identity requirements to fully arrive and then scrambling to respond, the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences is using the pilot to build experience now.
If eduwallet is about exploring what a digital wallet can mean for higher education, AUAS’s contribution shows exactly why that exploration matters. This is not innovation for innovation’s sake. It is a practical, measurable use case with a clear administrative pain point, a strong student benefit, and a realistic path to implementation. And in the end, that is where real change starts.
This interview was held between Nanda Haverkamp (project manager at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences) and Ana Goessens (co-founder Paradym & Animo Solutions). AUAS is participating in the eduwallet pilot to explore issuing and verifying diploma supplements as verifiable credentials with Paradym. Do you want to explore a real-world credential use case in higher education or another sector? Reach out to Ana or start building on Paradym’s free tier right now!