Digital wallets and new business models: what opportunities

From credential container to service infrastructure: how digital wallets reshape onboarding, trust and competitiveness

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For banks, insurers and payment service providers, digital identity is now the balance point between increasingly stringent compliance and an increasingly seamless customer experience. With the arrival of eIDAS 2.0 and the EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI Wallet), the European Union offers a standardized framework that allows financial institutions to combine security, regulatory compliance and onboarding speed, with a direct impact on competitiveness and growth.

Why digital wallets are changing the digital services market

The main reason is that they reduce the distance between identity, proof of a requirement and service activation. Today, many digital journeys are still broken: you identify yourself in one environment, upload documents in another, and sign in a third. Each step introduces friction, increases time and multiplies redundant data requests. Wallets promise to piece this mosaic back together. When a business can receive selective, verifiable and reusable information from a wallet, the logic of the service changes. It is no longer necessary to acquire everything to check everything; it becomes possible to request only the necessary information, at the moment it is needed. This makes the experience more linear for the user and, at the same time, reduces the operational burden linked to the collection, storage and verification of excessive documentation. This is where the topic stops being purely technological. A well-designed wallet acts on trust, speed and the ability of a service to scale more efficiently. This is why the digital services market is looking at it not as a simple feature, but as an infrastructural component of the relationship between businesses and users.

From identity to verifiable data: what makes a wallet strategic

The most strategic dimension of wallets is not the preservation of credentials, but the management of verifiable attributes. Age, residence, qualification, license, professional role, bank details, powers of representation: these are all elements that, if they can be shared in a selective and reliable way, change the design of many digital services. This logic is consistent with a greater focus on data minimization. If it is necessary to verify that a person is of legal age, it is not necessary to acquire the entire document with all the personal information. If it is necessary to prove a qualification or a requirement, what matters is the reliable proof of the attribute, not the accumulation of overabundant documentation. Looking ahead, this makes services more efficient and digital relationships more credible.

Onboarding, access and signature in a single experience

One of the most concrete impacts concerns onboarding. Today, many activation processes are slow because they distribute identification, data sharing, authentication and signing into separate phases. With digital wallets, these components can converge into a single experience. The user shares only what is needed, the system verifies faster, the process closes with fewer steps and less friction. This is particularly relevant in verification-intensive services, but it does not only affect regulated sectors. Every time a service requires certain identification, proof of a requirement or the signing of a document, the convergence between onboarding, access and signature can generate a tangible advantage for both the business and the customer.

Less friction, more trust, more conversion

Reducing friction also means increasing trust. A wallet communicates greater control by the user, more transparency in data sharing and a general feeling of security. In a market where people are increasingly attentive to privacy, fraud and data misuse, these elements weigh directly on the willingness to complete a process or return to use a service. The benefit is therefore not only reputational. Where the journey becomes simpler, conversion metrics can also improve. Fewer superfluous steps, fewer drop-offs, fewer repeated manual checks: the wallet acts on multiple levels simultaneously, transforming a technical topic into a lever that touches customer experience, acquisition and loyalty.

The new business models enabled by digital wallets

When identity and attributes become portable, selective and verifiable, the scope of possible services expands. Wallets open up new business models because they lower the cost of entry into processes that today are held back by slow verifications, scattered documentation or poor interoperability between systems and countries. In many cases, the real value will not just be to better digitize what already exists, but to design services that were previously too complex to manage.

Cross-border services and instant attribute verifications

The cross-border dimension is one of the most promising: if an identity or an attribute can be reliably recognized across different countries, many frictions that today slow down international onboarding, access and contracting are drastically reduced. This is particularly relevant in the European framework, where the mobility of people and services is already high but continues to clash with unharmonized national procedures. Instant attribute verifications further expand the scenario. Age, professional status, educational qualification, residence or specific requirements can become elements to be checked in a few seconds, without forcing users and operators into long document exchanges. The speed of verification, in these contexts, is not a detail: it radically changes the design of the service.

New opportunities in finance, utility, mobility, education and retail

The potential applications are already very clear:

• in finance, wallets can reduce friction in opening accounts, subscribing to products and KYC verifications;
• in utilities, they can simplify contract activation and access to benefits; in mobility, they can support digital authorizations and qualifications;
• in education, they favor the management of qualifications and credentials;
• in retail, they enable proof of age, less invasive loyalty programs and faster purchase paths.

The interesting point is that all this is based less on the accumulation of data and more on the quality of the information shared. Wallets introduce a logic where value comes from the verifiability and reusability of attributes. For many businesses, it is a paradigm shift that deserves attention well before it becomes a market obligation.

How to prepare today for the evolution of European wallets and IT Wallet

Preparing does not mean waiting for the final release of the wallets to intervene at the last moment, it means starting with a survey of the processes in which identity, authentication, onboarding and signature already have a significant weight today. Where do we ask for more data than necessary? At what points does the journey fragment? How much does manual verification management weigh? These questions help to understand where a wallet can bring real benefit. The second step concerns architecture. Companies must assess how ready existing systems are to dialogue with ecosystems like EUDI Wallet and IT Wallet, to manage verifiable credentials and to integrate consistent mechanisms for authentication, single sign-on and electronic signature. Organizations that start thinking about these aspects now are not chasing a trend: they are building the conditions to compete better in a market where digital trust will increasingly be a true service infrastructure.

Discover the solutions for your company’s digital transformation:

• Electronic Archiving
• Identification
• EDI – Electronic Data Interchange
• Electronic Invoicing
• International Electronic Invoicing
• Electronic Signature
• Document Management Software
• Supply Chain Management