What changes with eIDAS 2 and the EU digital wallet?

eIDAS 2 is Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, amending the 2014 eIDAS Regulation and introducing the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI Wallet), a digital identity app every Member State must make available to citizens, residents and businesses. The technical core is not the app itself but the verifiable credentials flowing through it, called electronic attestations of attributes in the regulation's text: cryptographically signed digital proofs certifying a single fact, for example being of legal age, holding a professional qualification, or being an authorized employee of a company, without exposing the entire document and without the verifier having to query a central registry. For a business the paradigm shift is less about the citizen's wallet, already widely covered elsewhere, and more about the ability to issue and verify credentials of this kind inside its own B2B processes: customer and supplier onboarding, signature delegation, mandates.

What it introduces, beyond the citizen wallet

The regulation defines a distinct role for businesses: that of relying party, the organization receiving and verifying a credential, and that of qualified issuer, the organization authorized to issue one. A professional association can issue the credential proving registration on its roll; a company can issue one attesting an employee's role or a proxy's mandate. The verifier gets a cryptographic proof of the claimed attribute, not the person's entire file: this is selective disclosure minimization, reducing the surface of data handled compared to a scanned ID copy or a delegation letter.

The enterprise angle: onboarding, signature, agents

For anyone running identity verification processes this changes the model: instead of validating a document and hoping it is genuine, you verify a cryptographic signature issued by a recognized entity. B2B supplier onboarding, today done with registered mail, chamber-of-commerce extracts and the signatory's document, can shrink to verifying two or three verifiable credentials in real time. The same applies to signature mandates: a proxy can become a verifiable credential with an explicit scope and expiry, revocable without redoing the whole paper process. The most concrete link to the rest of the glossary is with Non-Human Identity: an AI agent acting on a company's behalf will increasingly need to prove, with a verifiable credential rather than a plain API token, that a human or organization authorized it to complete a transaction, a theme central to agentic commerce as well.

Why it matters for decision makers, and what remains open

Real adoption in 2026 remains uneven across Member States: some have pilot wallets already live, others are still in technical transposition. For an Italian or European business the question is not "when does the wallet arrive", but preparing to act as both issuer and relying party once customers or suppliers start using it, building credential verification into existing identity and access management systems instead of scrambling once the rule is already in force.

This entry is informational and does not constitute legal advice: for compliance with eIDAS 2 and its applicable implementing acts, involve your DPO or legal counsel.