BankID credentials paving the way for EU Business Wallet

BankID introduced identification and representation credentials to online services in Finland as early as 1992, when insurance companies needed trusted digital personal authentication to grant loans to their enterprise customers. Since then, BankID has expanded to especially the Nordic countries as the dominant and economical method and today enables citizens to:

1. Identify themselves in thousands of public and private services – on average approaching 100 times per citizen each year.

2. Sign legally binding contracts, starting with loan agreements already in the 1990s.

3. Identify themselves when acting on behalf of employers.

4. Sign legally binding contracts on behalf of employers.

5. Act on behalf of other persons.

BankID demonstrated the power of a general-purpose, trusted, real-time tool backed by anti-money laundering and KYC legislation. Its value stems from:

• Economy of repetition – learn once, use everywhere 

• Economy of trust – built on the must-have trust in the banking systems.

• Economy of reuse – many use cases for each credential 

• Economy of standardisation – seamless cross-sector adoption driving standardisation s

• Economy of real time – instant, secure transactions.

The resulting contribution to national economies has been enormous.

Now, the next step – EU citizen, business, public sector and AI-agent wallets – will multiply this value: enabling real-time, verifiable credential exchange between all parties, at work and at home, across the entire Single Market. Without this trust-building foundation, the potential of AI-agents will remain limited.

While awaiting state-issued identification credentials for citizens and businesses, existing bank KYC-based credentials should be fully leveraged in every country. Banks are uniquely positioned – they both supply credentials(starting with something as simple as the IBAN credential) and need credentials to streamline compliance, risk management and services.

The EU Commission, ECB, governments at large and banks must recognise this as a critical transition step. Every year gained in widening credential streams represents an immense economic impact – simply too massive to ignore.