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This is part three of our four-part series on why digital credentials are the next identity primitive. You can read part one here, part two here, and part three here.
Across Europe, governments are building digital identity wallets under Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, with at least one wallet per Member State due by the end of 2026. Issuers are preparing to produce verifiable credentials in standardised formats and put them into people's hands.
The test of whether any of it works falls on the receiving end: whether organisations can reliably accept and verify what is presented to them. That is the problem we chose to solve at Vidos.
We believe the most consequential and least-addressed challenge in this shift falls on the acceptance side. Wallets and issuance often get more attention than acceptance infrastructure, but this is where the identity transition either delivers or stalls.
Consider the mandate itself. Under eIDAS 2.0, banks, insurers, telecoms, and major online platforms must accept wallet credentials by December 2027. Relying party registration is now mandatory under Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/848, requiring organisations to register in at least one Member State and declare which attributes they will request. More than 273,000 EU organisations fall within scope.
The regulation creates the obligation. The question is whether the infrastructure to meet it exists; in most organisations, it does not yet.
That question shaped what we built and what we chose to leave alone.
We chose to focus exclusively on verification. We do not issue credentials, provide wallets, or store personal data. The reasoning follows from what the verification role actually requires.
An organisation verifying a credential needs to trust that the verification layer has no conflicts of interest, no ability to correlate user activity across services, and no incentive other than giving an accurate trust decision. If the same platform issuing credentials is also verifying them, that independence is compromised. If it stores personal data, it becomes a honeypot and a liability rather than a utility.
Vidos was built with that architectural neutrality because we believe it is what the relying party needs: a verification layer whose only job is to confirm that a credential is authentic, valid, and fit for purpose.
Accepting a credential sounds simple until you try to do it across 27 Member State wallets, each with different credential formats, trust lists, registration requirements, and cryptographic trust chains. The standards are still converging, with active work across W3C Verifiable Credentials, ISO 18013-5/7 for mobile driving licences, the EUDI Wallet Architecture Reference Framework, and OpenID4VP as a presentation protocol.
The infrastructure also needs to handle two very different workloads. The initial identity verification (onboarding a new customer, for instance) is a high-assurance, lower-volume flow. Ongoing authentication (logging in, authorising a payment) is a high-frequency, low-latency flow. Both use credentials; the performance profile and trust requirements differ across each, and the platform must accommodate both cleanly.
Our founding team has been building in the digital credentials space since 2018. We have validated our platform against 18 EUDI wallet implementations across 12 EU Member States. We completed projects in the Central Bank of Ireland Innovation Sandbox in July 2025 and in the UK FCA Digital Sandbox for APP fraud prevention, with an interim report released in November 2025. We achieved UK DIATF certification in September 2025 as an Attribute, Component, and Orchestration Service Provider on the DVS Register. As an organisation, Vidos holds ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certifications.
Vidos absorbs the complexity of credential verification so that the organisation does not have to. One integration gives access to every credential format we support, continuously maintained as regulations, standards, and wallet implementations evolve. When a new Member State wallet goes live, a trust list updates, or the Architecture Reference Framework publishes a new version, that work happens on our side.
Most organisations still treat identity verification as a compliance cost: something to be minimised, outsourced, or absorbed as overhead. Industry research is beginning to reframe it as a structural shift (identity moving from cost centre to revenue enabler), and the economics support the argument.
Organisations that build acceptance infrastructure early are building something reusable. Each credential verified at onboarding can be referenced for subsequent interactions, reducing the need for repeated document checks, additional authentication steps, or manual reviews. Faster onboarding reduces abandoned sign-ups, reusable credentials lower cost-per-transaction over time, and stronger trust decisions cut fraud losses. Each credential an organisation can accept and re-verify removes a document check, a manual review step, and a friction point in the customer journey.
Digital credentials are the next identity primitive, and the practical bottleneck is on the acceptance side. The regulation is published, the deadlines are fixed, and wallets are being deployed across Member States. The question facing most organisations is how to build verification infrastructure that handles what those wallets present, across 27 implementations, converging standards, and trust frameworks that are still evolving.
If your organisation is preparing for this transition, we would welcome the conversation. You can reach us at vidos.id.
Vidos provides digital identity verification infrastructure for financial institutions, government agencies, and enterprises. In the EU, Vidos helps organisations meet their eIDAS 2.0 acceptance obligations, with validated compatibility across 18 EUDI wallet implementations spanning 12 Member States. In the UK, Vidos is certified under the Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework as an Orchestration Service Provider and Attribute Service Provider. Find out more at vidos.id.
Author: Tim Boeckmann, CEO and co-founder of Vidos
