DG CONNECT presents updates on the wallet at recent events

DG Connect recently gave updates on the EU Digital Identity Wallet project at a series of high- profile events; including the European Identity and Cloud Conference 2024, and Identity Week Europe

Paolo De Rosa of DG CONNECT gave the keynote speech at Identity Week Europe, which took place in Amsterdam on 11 and 12 June. It’s the world's largest identity related event, attracting a wide mix of policymakers, private sector representatives, and technical experts.

Helping to achieve the 2030 Digital Decade

Paolo began his keynote by underlining the key role of the wallet in fulfilling the European Commission’s 2030 Digital Decade Programme goals, in particular making key public services 100% online and giving the whole EU population access to E-ID and digital health records.

He then specified how the EU Digital Identity Wallet will achieve these goals by creating a new Digital Public Infrastructure. The G20 defined it in a 2023 report as follows:

“Shared digital systems that should be secure and interoperable and can be built on open standards and specifications to deliver and provide equitable access to public and or private services at societal scale”

The wallet provides strong Digital Public Infrastructure by ensuring everyone in Europe has access to a safe, reliable and privacy-enhancing means of identification, that will be interoperable and recognised across Europe. A key goal of the wallet is to avoid fragmentation in the EU Digital Identity ecosystem.

The Roadmap to the wallet

Next, updates on project milestones were presented:

• The EU Digital Identity Framework Regulation entered into force on 20/05/2024
• Version 1.4 of Architecture and Reference Framework (ARF) published for public feedback on Github. Deadline for feedback is 30/06/2024
• The first release of The Reference Implementation, which consists of libraries and software components on Github with regular updates to come.

Particular emphasis was put on how essential public feedback is to the refinement of the ARF and Reference Implementation, and all interested parties are thoroughly encouraged to provide it on our Github.