European Business Wallet: Trusted Cross-Border Business with eIDAS 2.0

From identification and digital mandates to digital signatures and trusted data exchange: what the European Business Wallet era means for European businesses and institutions.

Europe’s digital economy is moving from fragmented, paper-heavy processes toward instant, verifiable, and legally effective business interactions across borders. At the heart of this shift is eIDAS 2.0 and the emergence of the European Business Wallet (EBW) as a standard interface for organizational identity, verified data, and legally binding actions.

The European Commission’s ambition is clear: reduce administrative burden, strengthen cross-border interoperability, and enable organizations to spend less time on compliance paperwork and more time on value creation. European Business Wallets are positioned as a practical enabler of that vision, with the Commission estimating that Business Wallets could unlock at least €160 billion in savings for businesses each year.

This article explains what will change, which EBW capabilities matter most, how they translate into concrete workflows across industries, and how Spherity’s European Business Wallet solution helps organizations prepare for and benefit from the EBW era.

The Problem: Fragmented Digital Processes and Data Silos 

Despite decades of digitalization, many B2B and B2G processes across Europe remain inefficient. Companies repeatedly submit the same evidence: commercial register extracts, licenses, certificates, proof of representation, and other documents to different counterparties. In regulated onboarding, these checks are often slow, costly, and inconsistent. The result is friction, duplicated verification, and risk exposure 

eIDAS 2.0 modernizes Europe’s digital identity and trust framework to reduce these frictions by strengthening mutual recognition across Member States, expanding the role of trust services, and establishing wallets as a standard interface for identity data, verifiable credentials, and legally binding actions. The EU Digital Identity Wallet framework is expected to be available across Member States by the end of 2026, and European Business Wallets build on that foundation as a key lever to reduce administrative burden and enable cross-border digital business, according to the European Commission.

What is the European Business Wallet (EBW)

According to the European Commission, a European Business Wallet is a digital wallet for organizations that enables them to receive, store, present, and share verified organizational credentials, and to perform legally effective actions in digital interactions with other businesses and public authorities.

In practice, the EBW becomes the organization’s “trust layer” for:

• proving company identity and attributes (e.g., registration, identifiers)

• proving representation rights (who can act on behalf of the company)

• sharing verified evidence (permits, certificates, compliance proofs)

• executing legally binding actions (signatures/seals, timestamps)

• enabling secure, auditable data exchange across ecosystems

European Business Wallets build on the technical foundations of the EU Digital Identity Wallets, with public administrations expected to implement use over a defined transition period after adoption of the Business Wallet measures. For more information about EBWs, please watch our explainer series. 

The EBW Capability Stack: What The Wallet Enables

The EBW enables use cases across industries by providing shared functionality that facilitates interoperability. This functionality composes reliable workflows that scale across organizations and borders.

1) Identification, Authentication and Authorisation

EBWs bring together identification, authentication, and authorization as a coherent trust chain for business interactions. They can hold authoritative evidence about an organization, such as legal name, registration status, identifiers, and other attributes, so relying parties can verify the identity of a business partner based on reliable sources like national registers. Building on that, EBWs support higher-assurance authentication of the legal person and the individuals acting on its behalf, reducing fraud risk by making impersonation significantly harder. Finally, EBWs enable machine-readable, verifiable attributes and roles that systems can use for authorization decisions, so access to services and workflows can be granted based on trusted evidence rather than repeated document checks.

4) Representation Rights and Delegation (Digital Mandates)

Separate from access permissions, many B2B and B2G processes require proof of legal authority to act on behalf of a company. EBWs support verifiable digital mandates that define the scope of representation and delegation, can be time-bounded and revocable, and can be checked automatically by counterparties. This enables legally reliable approvals, submissions, and other binding actions while maintaining flexibility and auditability.

5) Signatures, Seals, and Trust Services

Digital signatures and seals are essential to fully digitize business transactions. EBWs connect to trust services to make actions legally effective: signing, sealing, timestamping, and evidence trails suitable for audits.

6) Trusted Data Exchange with Selective Disclosure

EBWs support sharing verified evidence while limiting disclosure to what is necessary, and keeping interactions traceable and auditable. Documents and attestations are exchanged in a legally binding fashion, fostering the digitization of business processes.

7) Automation

Manual processes like monitoring business partner master data can be automated based on verifiable status information. Once changes are detected, the presentation of updated data is requested from the business partner.

Where EBW Capabilities Create Value: Workflow Clusters Across Industries

Many EBW scenarios differ in context, not in structure. The common thread is a set of recurring workflows that improve when identity, mandates, and verified evidence can be reused.

1) Onboarding and Compliance: KYB, KYC, and KYS

EBWs simplify onboarding by enabling KYB for organizations, including KYC checks for relevant natural persons (e.g., representatives and, where required, beneficial owners). Verified credentials can be processed in a machine-readable way, reducing repeated document collection and manual verification.

2) Licenses, Permits, and Certificates

Permits, authorizations, certifications, and attestations are often re-submitted across counterparties and borders. EBWs can hold these proofs as verifiable credentials, making verification faster, more consistent, and easier to audit.

3) Representation and Delegation for Legally Binding Actions

In many processes the key question is “who is authorized to act?” EBWs support portable proof of representation rights and controlled delegation (digital mandates), including time-bounded and revocable authority for approvals, submissions, and signatures.

4) Data Spaces and Trusted Data Sharing

Data spaces require verified participants and policy-based access. EBWs provide a trust layer for onboarding (organizational identity), controlled access (mandates), and auditability to support compliant data exchange.

5) Supply Chain Compliance and Digital Product Passports (DPPs)

DPP requirements apply to economic operators across the value chain. EBWs provide verifiable issuer identity and mandate, so recipients can validate which legal entity attested DPP data, whether it was authorized, and whether the attestation is still valid. For a practical example of how this is implemented in a DPP workflow, see Spherity’s Digital Product Passport solution.

6) Company Lifecycle After Registration

After registration, company and representation data can be issued as verifiable credentials and reused across banking, procurement, platform onboarding, and B2G procedures. Before registration, founders typically act via their personal EU Digital Identity Wallet; after registration, the organization can operate via its EBW.

Getting EBW-Ready: Who Should Act Now

A practical way to move from awareness to readiness is to start with a few high-impact journeys and put reusable building blocks in place, such as organizational identity, mandates, and verification, that can be applied consistently across processes at scale.

SMEs and Mid-Sized Companies

Typical friction: repeatedly proving company identity, representation rights, and permits to banks, platforms, and buyers.

How Spherity helps: We help identify the highest-friction onboarding journeys and implement reusable organizational credentials and mandate flows so trusted evidence can be reused across counterparties.

Enterprises and Ecosystem Orchestrators

Typical friction: inconsistent identity and delegation across subsidiaries, suppliers, and partner networks.

How Spherity helps: We provide enterprise-grade infrastructure for legal person identity, representation, delegation, governance, and auditability, designed for scale across multi-entity organizations and ecosystems. Our standardised interfaces enable seamless integration with existing IT landscapes, facilitating automated end-to-end processes. 

Regulated Service Providers: Finance, Telecom, Energy, Platforms

Typical friction: high KYB/KYS costs, fraud risk, and recurring evidence refresh.

How Spherity helps: We integrate verification of organizational credentials and mandates into onboarding and periodic reviews, enabling stronger assurance and better audit trails with less manual re-verification.

Further reading: Enterprise Security Magazine — ‘The EU Business Wallet: A Cornerstone for Trusted Business Interactions’.

Where Spherity Is Involved: Ecosystem Proof Points For European Business Wallet (EBW) Readiness

Spherity is involved in numerous national and EU-wide ecosystems that are actively shaping the future of trusted digital identity. This deep engagement positions Spherity as a key player in building the European Business Wallet landscape, both from a technical and regulatory readiness perspective.

At the European level, Spherity participates in the WE BUILD consortium, one of the large-scale initiatives shaping Business Wallet requirements, standards, and practical use cases. This ensures early alignment with EU-level regulatory and technical expectations. Most recently, WE BUILD captured this direction in the non-paper ‘Trusted Identities for AI agents: An Opportunity for Europe’, co-authored by Spherity’s CEO Dr. Carsten Stöcker, which highlights why Europe’s wallet infrastructure (including the emerging Business Wallet) can become a scalable trust layer for AI-driven business processes.”

Spherity contributed to the idFlexNetz project by delivering the EU Business Wallet–ready trust infrastructure for critical infrastructure, starting with the energy sector. The project shows how wallet-based organizational identity and trusted credentials can be applied in highly regulated, real-world environments to enable interoperable B2B communication and secure data sharing.

Spherity is also active in sphin-X, contributing European Business Wallet capabilities to a collaborative healthcare data space focused on data sovereignty and trusted exchange.

In addition, Spherity contributes across the Chem-X ecosystem with our Enterprise Wallet and Digital Product Passport (DPP) expertise by enabling secure, interoperable enterprise identities and DPP-ready data exchange across the Chem-X ecosystem.

Last but not least, through its partnership with Bundesanzeiger Verlag, Spherity supports the use of certified business data as verifiable credentials, particularly relevant for registration, disclosure, and regulatory reporting.

Conclusion

The European Business Wallet is not just a “digital ID for companies.” It is a reusable trust layer for cross-border business: organizational identity, mandates, verified evidence, and legally binding actions, designed to reduce friction, improve compliance, and enable scalable cooperation across industries.

If your organization depends on regulated onboarding, supply chain evidence, trusted data sharing, or DPP-style attestations, EBW readiness is becoming a strategic advantage, and the time to prepare is now.

If your organization wants to explore how a European Business Wallet solution can support your journey, from KYB/KYC acceleration to delegated authority and cross-border credential exchange, Spherity is ready to help define a practical, step-by-step roadmap. 

For more information, visit our website: https://www.spherity.com/eida 

Get in touch with our European Business Wallet experts: https://www.spherity.com/contact 

Note: This article was created using artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) and may include automatically generated text