The European Commission has announced that it will fund a multi-national and multi-company consortium as part of a larger pilot project involving a regional digital wallet programme. The digital wallet pilot project  – one of four — is due to launch in March 2023.

The pilot will be led by NOBID, a set of Nordic and Baltic countries who, together with Italy and Germany, are developing a large-scale pilot for the payment use case in the EU Digital Wallet, and is also known as the Nordic-Baltic eID Project. Funding will come from the EU Commission’s Digital Europa Programme. Technology players in the project include payments group Thales and onboarding and ID verification specialist iProov.

According Biometric Update, iProov CEO Andrew Bud says in a company announcement that the project will prove that verifiable credentials and biometrics can address emerging challenges in payments. Financial companies, including banks, in Germany, Norway, Denmark, Italy, and Iceland will be part of the effort. Nevertheless, according to the source members will be from seemingly far afield when it comes to the domains covered.

Latvia State Radio and Television will participate, for example. How will the resulting wallet look like? Under NOBID’s leadership following its harmonisation of several national eID programmes comprising tens of millions of European citizens, the group set out then to collaborate for the concretisation of the cross-border payments wallet. As explained by the consortium the EU digital identity wallet is a biometrically-secured app that, when it comes into being, will allow citizens across the continent to easily verify their ID, access public and private services and store sensitive digital documents in one place.

Timeline of implementation for the digital wallet pilot This pilot and the other ongoing three ones are set to function with the European Digital Identity Wallet, integrating into national electronic ID programs in the EU. NOBID has a running start on this project. It is already part of the Nordic Council of Ministers’ effort to harmonize digital IDs in eight Nordic and Baltic nations.

Others in the pilot will build on NOBID’s infrastructure. All four pilot programmes were announced initially in the beginning of 2022, to test the deployment of the European Digital Identity Wallet, with a call for proposals pointed out by Ronny Khan of the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency. As explained at the time, all four ai to forward the deployment the European Digital Identity Wallet (DIW) in national eID ecosystems operated by Member States.

They will also look at the successful implementation of the revised eIDAS regulatory framework by public and private sector service providers to exchange digital identity credentials across Member States. The official launch of the digital ID wallet was scheduled to take place in September 2022. In September, NOBID launched the proposal to build the European Union’s priority use cases for the wallet – payments.

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