eIDAS 2.0: digital identity as a competitive advantage for financial institutions

Per le istituzioni finanziarie, eIDAS 2.0 e il Wallet UE di Identità Digitale offrono un’opportunità concreta: trasformare l’identità digitale da obbligo di compliance in un vantaggio competitivo, con onboarding più veloci, KYC più efficiente e architetture pronte per il mercato europeo.

In questo articolo scoprirai:

For banks, insurers and payment service providers, digital identity is now the balance point between increasingly stringent compliance and an increasingly fluid 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.

IDAS 2.0: a regulatory framework for European identity

eIDAS 2.0 (Electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services) is the revision of EU regulation 910/2014, designed to enable digital identification, authentication and trust services in an increasingly integrated and digital market. The new framework improves interoperability between national eIDs and European ecosystems, introduces the EU Digital Identity Wallet and strengthens standards on qualified electronic signature and trust services.
For the financial sector, eIDAS 2.0 is not just a technical topic, but a strategic regulatory reference on which to build identity, KYC and customer verification architectures, preparing the organization for the new logic of electronic identification.

eIDAS 2.0 and AMLR: the regulatory context for banks

eIDAS 2.0 integrates with the AMLR (Anti‑Money Laundering Regulation) regulation, which imposes stricter requirements for electronic identification and customer due diligence. In summary, the main innovations are:

• Harmonization of electronic identification criteria across all Member States, with the introduction of three secure methods, including the EUDI Wallet, qualified electronic signatures and EU-recognized eIDs.
• By July 2027, regulated institutions will have to comply with new AMLR obligations related to electronic verification.
• By December 2027, they will have to offer the EUDI Wallet as an available identification channel, accelerating the transition to digital identity.

Those who delay in adapting risk accumulating operational costs on legacy flows and losing competitive ground compared to those who integrate eIDAS‑compliant infrastructures first.

Onboarding, KYC and authentication in the new paradigm

With eIDAS 2.0 onboarding becomes less document-based and more deterministic: the customer shares only the necessary attributes directly from the wallet, without having to continuously upload paper documents. The main advantages are:

• Less friction: the process is streamlined and abandonment in account opening and service subscription flows is reduced.
• More reliable data: reduction of manual releases, greater accuracy and direct benefits on KYC and AML.

In parallel, authentication is strengthened: a high-assurance digital identity allows to satisfy Strong Customer Authentication requirements without weighing down the user experience, reducing blocked sessions and fraud risks. For banks, this means faster onboarding, shorter delivery times and a positive impact on time‑to‑revenue.

Responsibility between wallets, citizens and institutions

The eIDAS 2.0 identity model is more decentralized, but responsibility remains clearly distributed.

• Citizens manage their own wallet and decide which attributes to share.
• Qualified issuing bodies (typically public administrations) issue and guarantee the correctness of verified data.
• Financial institutions remain relying parties, responsible for technical verification of credentials, KYC/AML checks and GDPR compliance.

A more robust digital identity reduces uncertainty on data, but does not transfer regulatory responsibility to the issuing body: compliance remains with the institution.

Who will really benefit: early movers or followers?

Many institutions wonder if anticipating eIDAS 2.0 will really make a difference or if in the end almost everyone will wait until the rule becomes inevitable. Those who move first, however, will not limit themselves to meeting compliance deadlines, but will redesign the role of identity in their business model.
By natively integrating the EUDI Wallet capabilities introduced by eIDAS 2.0 directly into onboarding, KYC and authentication flows, early adopters can measurably reduce friction in account opening and service subscription phases, improve conversion by cutting times and drop‑offs, lower exposure to fraud related to counterfeited identity and create a reusable and cross‑border digital identity architecture. In this scenario, identity stops being a simple compliance checkpoint to become a real driver of growth.
Institutions that instead decide to wait until the last minute, when the eIDAS 2.0 deadline is around the corner, will be forced into a reactive implementation, integrating the wallet as an additional layer on legacy processes, maintaining fragmented and inconsistent onboarding and gaining little strategic value from the transition to digital identity. Compliance will be achieved, but a structural competitive advantage will remain in the hands of those who have redesigned the identification architecture in time.
In parallel, a temporal distortion emerges in the market: many institutions focus attention only on the December 2027 deadline of the eIDAS 2.0 wallet‑mandate, leaving aside the more immediate operational implications posed by the AMLR regulation, already active from July 2027. Treating these two steps as isolated regulatory events entails a temporary compliance gap, a double integration effort on separate systems and a less coherent architecture. A coordinated strategy between the two deadlines allows to simplify the onboarding architecture in a single transformation cycle, reduce complexity and operational risks and improve the customer experience along the entire customer journey.

Intesa ID: the “wallet‑ready” platform to anticipate eIDAS 2.0

The Intesa ID identification platform is designed to accompany financial institutions in adapting to the new digital identity and KYC standards.
It integrates IT Wallet and EUDI Wallet, SPID and CIE, self onboarding based on AI and video recognition and interaction in a single layer, allowing to verify identity securely, issue qualified (Q)EAA attributes and reduce integration complexity with a single connection.
Thanks to wallet ready platforms like Intesa ID, financial institutions can leverage digital identity not as a constraint, but as a competitive advantage: complying in advance with eIDAS 2.0 and AMLR, improving compliance and making the entire identification process faster, safer and more scalable.