The hybrid era of digital identity is already here
If you follow the conversation happening across digital identity forums right now, you'd think physical documents as proof of identity are already dead. With the EU racing toward EUDI Wallet availability under eIDAS 2.0, the industry is fixated on a frictionless, fully digital future.
It's a compelling vision, but it's also a trap for enterprise risk, product, and compliance leaders that can lead to binary thinking.
Here's the regulatory reality.
Member states must make a wallet available by December 2026. Acceptance becomes mandatory for public services the moment it's live, and for private-sector relying parties, including banking, telecoms, and financial services, by December 2027. However, adoption by citizens stays voluntary. Nobody is required to use the wallet.
Even that December 2026 date is softer than it looks. We are hearing that some national wallets won't land until after the legal deadline, and several other states are further behind, with build work only just getting underway. A synchronized EU-wide launch is turning into a staggered rollout, country by country.
There's a second, quieter gap worth knowing.
The aim is full interoperability, EUDI wallets working across all 27 member states, but the mechanism for a business to register as a relying party, the process that lets you legally request and verify a credential, isn't harmonized yet. A company wanting to accept the wallet across several markets today faces a different registration process in each one. Interoperable on paper, fragmented in practice.
One transition, different customer needs
Layer the demand side on top and you get three groups colliding at once… digital-native early adopters who'll switch the moment a wallet is available, the tech-hesitant who'll stick with physical documents for years out of habit or lack of access, and international customers who sit outside eIDAS scope entirely but still need to open accounts and access services.
We're not entering a digital-only identity landscape overnight. We're entering a Hybrid Era that will run for the next 5 years +.
It's also worth remembering none of this is entirely new. Sweden's BankID, live since 2003, is used by roughly 94% of smartpho ne used by 99.9% of 18-67 year olds users for banking, payments, government services, and medical records. Denmark's MitID sits at 96.6% adoption among adults, with most people using it weekly. These markets have spent two decades learning what high-trust, high-frequency digital identity actually looks like, including where onboarding breaks down. Reviewing how they built that trust is a genuinely useful head start for modelling what mainstream EUDI adoption will look like elsewhere.
Why a single-path strategy creates commercial risk
Choosing one path is still a commercial non-starter, and now a harder one to defend. Go digital-only and you alienate the hesitant, lock out global revenue, and inherit a patchwork rollout with inconsistent relying-party rules on top. Stay legacy and you lose the efficiency of digital-native onboarding entirely and frustrate those individuals that want to use their Digital ID.
The instinct I keep seeing is businesses thinking they need to go full Digital ID, i.e. treat the wallet as the new front door and rebuild onboarding around it before anything else. It's an expensive overcorrection. Most of your customers won't be carrying a wallet for years, in some markets they'll never have the option, and the rollout and registration gaps above mean the wallet itself isn't reliably ready yet either. Rebuild too early around a single rail and you've spent the engineering budget on infrastructure that can't yet carry your full onboarding volume, while the passport scans and database checks still serving most of your customers get treated as an afterthought.
The winners here won't be whoever ships the fastest wallet integration. It'll be whoever builds the most resilient orchestration layer, one that treats a digital credential, a scanned passport, and a database check as interchangeable trust anchors feeding the same risk engine, regardless of which member state or market it's coming from. It's a big part of why we've built GBG Go the way we have.
The EUDI wallet is real progress, and the Nordics show how much value is on the table once digital ID adoption matures. But a hybrid identity strategy, not a digital-only one, is what protects revenue today and keeps every customer able to get through the door while the rest of Europe catches up.
The European Digital Identity Wallet is intended to give people a secure way to store and share verified identity information and other credentials when accessing public and private services across the EU.
No. Use of the wallet by citizens is expected to remain voluntary, so organisations will still need to support customers who prefer or depend on other identity verification methods.
Not in the near term. Adoption, availability and customer needs will vary by market, while international customers may sit outside the scope of eIDAS. Physical documents and data-based checks will therefore remain important parts of many onboarding journeys.
A hybrid approach allows organisations to accept digital credentials where they are available and appropriate while maintaining document and data-based verification for customers and markets that still rely on them. This helps reduce exclusion, protect conversion and manage an uneven rollout.
Organisations should prioritise an orchestration layer that can evaluate digital credentials, documents and data checks against consistent risk thresholds and regulatory requirements. They should also plan for different adoption rates and relying-party processes across markets.