The EUDI Wallet in Germany and the transfer of the solution to Romania

August 12, 2026

Melany Pașca

Will we get the wallet from the service desk?

The national context: How digitalized is Germany?

In the June 2026 country report for Germany, the European Commission emphasizes that the digitalization of public services is one of the “persistent structural challenges,” attributing the stagnation to the fragmentation of the IT landscape across more than 11,000 municipalities and the absence of common standards. While acknowledging the momentum brought by the establishment of the new ministry for digitalization, the formal recommendations addressed to Germany also include accelerating the adoption of digital public services and simplifying and promoting the use of eID.

In 2025, 52% of EU citizens aged 16 to 74 used an electronic identification means to authenticate to online services, compared to 41% in 2023.

The extremes are telling: Denmark reached 99%, Finland 96%, and the Netherlands 95%, while at the opposite end are Romania with 10%, Bulgaria with 12%, Slovakia with 14%, and Germany with 15%.

Electronic identification (eID) in Europe: who uses it?

Persons who used their electronic identity to access online services for private purposes in the last 12 months (% of the population).

Click on a country to see the change between 2023 and 2025.

EU-27 average

202341.1%

202552.3%

eID usage in 2025 (% of individuals)

0%25%50%75%100%

When it comes to using eID to access public services, this percentage barely exceeds the 12% threshold in the case of Germany, despite an increase of over 5 percentage points in 2 years, and in the case of Romania, the percentage is below 5%, up from 1.58% in 2023.

Persons who used their electronic identity to access public services in their country in the last 12 months (% of the population).

Click on a country to see the change between 2023 and 2025.

EU-27 average

202336.1%

202546.4%

eID usage for public services in 2025 (% of population)

0%25%50%75%100%

The figures show that, for both countries, the central issue remains the effective use of electronic identification beyond its mere technical availability, and precisely this ratio between supply and utilization constitutes the test that the EUDI wallet must pass. Germany and Romania thus occupy among the bottom positions in the Union regarding the use of electronic identity. Unlike Romania, Germany understood as early as 2023 the transformative potential of the EUDI wallet and chose an approach that goes beyond the logic of compliance with European regulations, which we will analyze below.

The German response: the wallet as an accelerator of digital transformation

There is a direct link between the EUDI wallet and closing the gap regarding access to electronic public services. The main reasoning, which also applies to Romania, can be summarized as follows: most administrative services remain undigitalized or incompletely digitalized because the secure identification of the applicant still requires physical presence, therefore a universal, free, useful, and easy-to-use electronic identification means eliminates this bottleneck and allows the full digitalization of processes. Furthermore, there is the lack of integration with public and private services, which determines the utility of such an instrument. Afterward, the need arises for a solution with a high level of assurance, developed within a framework that guarantees its reliability: precisely the complex framework designed at the European level for the EUDI wallet.

The Federal Ministry of the Interior, and as of 2025 the new Federal Ministry for Digitalization and State Modernization (BMDS), entrusted the implementation of the project to the federal agency for breakthrough innovation SPRIND, a public entity with the status of a commercial company, created to finance and develop technologies with disruptive potential outside ordinary administrative procedures, a delegation that placed the project within an organization capable of contracting rapidly, working iteratively, and attracting industry specialists.

The process began as early as 2023 with an open architecture and consultation exercise, in which the technical proposals for the German wallet were published on the openCode platform and submitted to the debate of the specialist community, under the coordination of a chief architect recruited from the private sector. On this basis, SPRIND launched in 2024 the Funke EUDI Wallet Prototypes innovation competition, held over 15 months in three elimination stages: six teams selected in the first stage each received up to EUR 300,000, four teams qualified in the second stage received again up to EUR 300,000, and the teams in the final stage benefited from up to EUR 450,000 each.

For the production infrastructure, SPRIND organized a European-level tender, won in December 2025 by a consortium led by youniqx Identity, the digital subsidiary of the Austrian state printing office, together with A1 Digital International, CRYPTAS Group, and msg group, a consortium responsible for building the technical platform that supports the secure and compliant operation of the application.

The development of the ecosystem

The German government understood from the eID experience that the wallet has value only if there is a true ecosystem that contributes to its success, which is why a significant portion of the resources was directed towards supporting it, rather than just the application. In January 2026, SPRIND launched a national sandbox where service providers test their integration with the state wallet. During the first six months of operation, 115 organizations and approximately 150 use cases passed through the sandbox, in preparation for the public launch of the first phase of the state application, scheduled for early 2027.

The private sector mobilization component was formalized in November 2025, when BMDS signed a memorandum of collaboration on the wallet with over 75 companies, through which the ministry commits to integrating industry feedback, and the signatories evaluate the readiness level for identification, age verification, and credential issuance in the third quarter of 2026.

The project brought a team of digital identity architects and engineers inside SPRIND, attracted international development teams, and built for 80 million potential users at a high assurance level, a sizing that entails operating capabilities comparable to those of large commercial platforms.

Furthermore, an Ecosystem Knowledge Center was developed, serving as a contact point for companies and interested actors to find information and materials for participation in the ecosystem.

Costs

The budgetary scale of the German commitment is quantified in the impact assessment of the Digital Identity Act (Digitale Identitätsgesetz), adopted by the federal cabinet as the implementing law of the European regulation. The document details the costs of developing the wallet ecosystem beyond the development of the application itself:

Federal Office for Information Security

receives EUR 237,000 in one-off costs and EUR 920,000 annually for certification schemes and incident management,

Federal Office of Administration

receives EUR 9.2 million for building the central data extraction service through the national once-only system and EUR 2.1 million annually for its operation, and

Federal Network Agency

as the framework supervisory authority, receives EUR 2.3 million in one-off costs, EUR 230,000 annually for infrastructure, and EUR 2.6 million annually in personnel costs for approximately 19 newly created positions, of which 14.9 are dedicated to specialized duties

At the federal level, the single compliance burden amounts to EUR 95 million.

The German evaluation also quantifies the share of benefits that justifies the investment: citizens save 3.9 million hours annually, and the net administrative burden decreases by approximately EUR 121.7 million per year, making the federal cost appear as an investment with a direct fiscal return, recoverable in less than a year of full-parameter operation.

The transfer of the solution to Romania

Romania is in a starting position comparable in terms of the gap, as shown, but more difficult in terms of resources.

In June 2026, the Government of Romania announced its decision to adopt and use the German solution for the national wallet. The German partners made available to the Ministry of Internal Affairs the backend components and mobile applications for iOS and Android, specific to the roles of wallet provider and identity data provider, and the source code is used exclusively as a technical starting point, under an open-source regime. The transfer clearly has a broader European dimension. Romania’s adoption of a solution developed by another member state, made possible precisely thanks to the open-source regime imposed by the German side, illustrates how a well-resourced state’s investment can become a European public good.

The German experience offers several lessons regarding a new paradigm in the development of digital services.

Germany invested first in architecture and public consultation, then in competing prototypes, then in production infrastructure, and only finally in public launch. Furthermore, it treats private sector integration as a core program component rather than expecting it to be a natural consequence of the application's launch. The final and perhaps most relevant issue concerns institutional capacity: delegation to an agency with operational autonomy and execution capacity enabled a pace of delivery that classical ministerial structures had not achieved in two decades of e-government programs.

None of these apply to Romania at present. During the public session in July 2026, the Romanian authorities confirmed that the project’s multi-annual budget is still being built, and they did not disclose how many people are working full-time on adapting the German solution, even though the role architecture was clarified a few days ago: the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MAI) acts simultaneously in five capacities (wallet provider via DGCTI, PID provider via DGEP, electronic attribute provider, authentic source, and relying party via the MAI HUB); the Ministry of Economy, Digitalization, and Tourism (MEDAT) ensures governance, relations with stakeholders, and the single point of contact with the European Commission; the Special Telecommunications Service (STS) manages the national registry of providers and issues WRPRC/WRPAC certificates; and the Authority for Digitalization of Romania (ADR) supervises QTSP services. For the moment, no other public attribute-issuing institutions have been announced, aside from those belonging to MAI.

Implementation is set to be carried out predominantly with existing internal resources, supplemented by external expertise. A useful step is MAI’s participation in the European WE BUILD pilot as an Associated Partner (WP4).

Romania is therefore taking over the code of a solution that Germany supports with tens of millions of euros in permanent annual institutional functions and dedicated positions, without having conceived such allocations. The German eID precedent, and even the Romanian one with the ROeID scheme, shows how this asymmetry ends: a technically functional infrastructure, devoid of the institutions and personnel to build the ecosystem around it, caps the utilization of the solution.

The first version of RoEUDIW will include person identification data (PID) and tiered age-verification attributes, hence the minimum enshrined in the Regulation, while the issue of signing with a qualified certificate has not been addressed (the two options are purchasing the signature from private providers, following the Greek model, or developing the institutional capacity to issue it to all citizens). For this first version (Stage 1, planned for December 2026, the deadline imposed by the Regulation), only PID and age verification will be included; Stage 2, in 2027, aims to expand the national ecosystem through phased rollouts, the proposals being: the driving license (mDL), proof of domicile/residence, the vehicle registration certificate, and the criminal record extract, high-volume attestations with authentic sources already connected to the MAI HUB.”

Furthermore, because biometric mechanisms and remote enrollment are planned, in theory, for 2027, onboarding will take place, in the first phase, exclusively in person based on the electronic identity card—meaning we will pick up our wallet from the counter: all that a Government without an allocation of human and financial resources can offer at the time of writing for a project that can solve some of digitalization’s biggest “pain points”.

Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/798 allows onboarding either through a high assurance level eID or through a substantial level eID supplemented by additional identity proofing procedures (in accordance with ETSI TS 119 461), which together achieve the equivalent of the high level, provided they do not rely on automated facial comparison.

At the eID level, Romania has two solutions, but neither meets the requirements, because ROeID received a substantial assurance level, and the electronic identity associated with the electronic identity card (CEI) has not been notified to the Commission. In the absence of notification, its assurance level should be confirmed by a conformity assessment body, a step that the authorities have not announced.

Until this status is clarified, the counter remains the only secure path for onboarding, a thorn in any serious endeavor to increase the wallet’s adoption. We can only hope that the resolution of this issue will be expedited, as it jeopardizes the entire endeavor and kills the appetite of Romanians for the adoption of this instrument from the very beginning.

All is not lost yet, and the priorities, which I outlined in a more complex paper on the human resource required for RoEUDIW, are the following:

Institutional formula and leadership.

the selection and legal constitution of the task force's institutional formula and the appointment of a Program Director with a clear mandate to recruit experts according to a predefined scheme;

Secondment of the initial technical core.

the secondment of an initial technical core from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Special Telecommunications Service, the Ministry of Economy, Digitalization, Entrepreneurship and Tourism, and other relevant public institutions, so that work on integrating the German solution with national registries and the PID issuance process can begin without waiting for the completion of recruitment;

Inventory of private support.

inventorying the support that private companies can offer, keeping in mind that this must neither undermine nor replace the development of internal capacity;

Procurement and market components.

identifying any components that need to be purchased from the market and preparing public tenders accordingly;

Funding pathway.

confirming the funding pathway and securing the first tranche; and

Activation of the ecosystem function.

early activation of the ecosystem function, so that the portfolio of relying parties and attribute providers is built in parallel with the technical work, not after it.

The EUDI Wallet in Germany and the transfer of the solution to Romania

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