EU Action Grants: Accelerating the Best Use of Technologies

This call aims to facilitate the implementation of the European Digital Identity and Trust Ecosystem in line with the amended Regulation establishing the European Digital Identity Framework. The objective of the European Digital Identity Framework is to improve citizen’s and businesses’ access to highly trusted and secure electronic identity means and trust services such as electronic signatures or attestations of attributes, expand citizens’ possibilities to use them to access public and private online services and improve their ability to control when and with whom their personal identity data is accessed or shared. Private services that require strong user authentication, either under law or contractual obligations, will be required to accept EU Digital Identity Wallets.

Objective 

• The topic aims to support the implementation of the European Digital Identity and Trust Ecosystem and manage the transition between the current and future frameworks supplementing or replacing the current digital identity infrastructure (eID) by the EU Digital Identity Wallet framework. For this purpose, Member States and other participants to the European Digital Identity Ecosystem shall be enabled to rely on a set of specifications and tools supporting the implementation of the wallet, other identity means and trust services.

Scope 

• This topic focuses on pilot implementations of the EU Digital Identity and Trust ecosystem by public and private sector entities validating technical references, standards, components, infrastructures and solutions, for digital signatures for exchanging person identification data and (qualified) attestations of attributes by means of a personalised digital wallet.
• All pilot projects will be required to ensure legal alignment with the amended Regulation and implementing acts. Proposals should be aligned with the latest published version of the Architecture and Reference Framework (ARF), to ensure interoperability and promote standardization within the European Digital Identity framework.
• All projects must demonstrate their conformance with the technical specifications and standards set out for the European Digital Identity Wallet through conformance testing with a test infrastructure provided by the Commission. This must be done across the different functionalities and roles set out in the EU Digital Identity and Trust Ecosystem.
• The projects are encouraged to use the reference implementation for their proposals. All projects must integrate with the iterative development of the reference implementation of the Wallet throughout the project implementation to provide feedback to the Commission and the wallet developer.
• Moreover, the proposals shall include:
  • The implementation of onboarding procedures for Wallet Users, providers of person identification data (PID), electronic attestations of attributes (EAA), qualified electronic attestations of attributes (QEAA), and relying parties;
  • The integration of the interfaces of relying parties and PID, EAA, and QEAA providers to the Wallet in their pre-production systems;
  • The trialling of user journeys involving relevant core functionalities of the Wallet;
  • Comprehensive testing of the cross-border functionality of Wallets demonstrating readiness to progress into production with actual wallet users;
  • Cooperation with the Commission to integrate with the iterative development of the reference implementation of the Wallet including the successful integration of new releases of APIs for:
    • requesting PID, EAAs, and QEAAs, presentation and validation of services (including connectivity and compliance tests)
    • providing PID, EAAs, and QEAAs (including connectivity and compliance tests).
  • Completion of a sufficiently high number of national and cross-border transactions (i.e. with Providers and Holders of PID, EAAs, and QEAAs, Wallet Providers and Relying Parties coming from at least 3 different eligible countries) to demonstrate the Wallet’s functionalities.

Available Budget 

• The estimated available call budget is EUR 20 000 000.

Outcomes and Deliverables

• This action will support Member States in meeting their obligation under the upcoming Regulation to make a European Digital Identity Wallet available to citizens and businesses by the end of 2026. It will help drive the provisions of EAA/QEAAs to the wallet by providing support for Member States entities taking on the role of EAA/QEAA providers. It will support public and private replying parties in adapting to the European Digital Identity Wallet as a means for users to authenticate themselves to access a range of public and private services.
• The projects should support Member States in deploying a European Digital Identity Wallet and the associated infrastructure in line with the deadline set by the Regulation. By the conclusion of the projects, they should deliver:
  • A European Digital Identity Wallet to citizens and businesses
  • Deployment of national and cross-border use cases, by contributing to the further development, piloting, and operational exploitation of the priority use cases
  • Uptake of the European Digital Identity Wallet
  • Contributions to the technical development and maintenance of the European Digital Identity and Trust Ecosystem
• All projects should consider and contribute to technical discussions on how to address identity matching both in the context of the European Digital Identity Wallet and the use-cases being piloted.
• Projects are encouraged to contribute to the development and piloting of the security features underpinning the use cases piloted. This would typically include the development of solutions for the certification and access to the secure hardware chip or eSIM on a mobile device for the purposes of storing cryptographic materials.

Eligibility 

• In order to be eligible, the applicants (beneficiaries and affiliated entities) must:
  • be legal entities (public or private bodies)
  • be established in one of the eligible countries, i.e.:
    • EU Member States (including overseas countries and territories (OCTs))
    • non-EU countries:
      • EEA countries and countries associated to the Digital Europe Programme
• Specific cases
  • Natural persons — Natural persons are NOT eligible (with the exception of self-employed persons, i.e. sole traders, where the company does not have legal personality separate from that of the natural person).
  • International organisations — International organisations are not eligible, unless they are international organisations of European Interest within the meaning of Article 2 of the Digital Europe Regulation (i.e. international organisations the majority of whose members are Member States or whose headquarters are in a Member State).
  • Entities without legal personality — Entities which do not have legal personality under their national law may exceptionally participate, provided that their representatives have the capacity to undertake legal obligations on their behalf, and offer guarantees for the protection of the EU financial interests equivalent to that offered by legal persons.
  • EU bodies — EU bodies (with the exception of the European Commission Joint Research Centre) can NOT be part of the consortium.

For more information, visit European Commission.