Consortium proposes European Digital Identity Wallet payments pilot

PARTICIPANTS: Six European nations are taking part in the Nobid consortium’s cross-border wallet pilot

A consortium of government agencies, financial institutions, payments networks and technology providers from Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Latvia and Norway is proposing to launch a large-scale payments pilot to explore how the European Digital Identity Wallet being developed by the European Commission would support cross-border transactions.

The pilot proposed by the Nordic-Baltic eID Project (Nobid) will develop and test a solution based on existing eID and payments infrastructure across the six countries to “show how payments and ID can be combined effortlessly, across borders and in multiple currencies” and to “bring to life the most used of the European Union’s priority use cases for the wallet – payments”, the consortium says.

The pilot solution will “build on the inherent provisions of the wallet to perform strong customer authentication as well as transaction-linking fully satisfying the PSD2 requirements” and will support “several modalities […] including QR codes, push notifications and deep linking”.

If accepted, the Nobid proposal would become one of four digital identity wallet pilots that the European Commission is planning to implement.

“All the countries in the consortium have well-established digital infrastructures,” Nobid says.

“The consortium’s proposal focuses on payments, one of the top priority use cases in the EU’s digital ID wallet vision. Its implementation would leverage existing payment infrastructure to enable payment issuance, instant payments, account-to-account transfers and payment acceptance both in-store and online.

“It is designed to also complement wider EU plans to empower member states and streamline cross-border payments, such as the European Payments Initiative (EPI) and the Digital Euro.”

The European Union confirmed its plans to introduce an EU-wide European Digital Identity Wallet in June 2021 and two in three Europeans said they intend to use it in August 2021.

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