CASE 4

NSG&B's contribution to the EU Digital Wallets: structured data makes cross-border interoperability possible

With the implementation of the European Digital Identity Framework, the EU is paving the way for secure and efficient cross-border identity verification. Discover how NSG&B's API and Business Register Information Vocabulary are supporting the EU Digital Identity Wallet Consortium (EWC) in advancing interoperability and aligning with evolving EU legal standards.

The European Digital Identity Framework, which came into effect in May 2024, aims to provide EU citizens, residents, and businesses with a secure and efficient way to verify their identity. By 2026, each EU Member State should offer a standardized digital wallet, enabling digital authentication for both public and private sector services.

As part of this initiative, four large-scale pilot projects were launched in 2023 to test the so-called “Common Toolbox”, which serves as the base for the EU Digital Identity Wallet. One of these pilot projects is the EU Digital Identity Wallet Consortium (EWC), focusing on developing digital travel credentials across member states. 

NSG&B providing a common Nordic API and a vocabulary for business registry data

NSG&B’s work has been divided into four core solution areas, with one focused on reliability and data quality, aligning closely with EWC’s objectives for the EU digital wallet. More specifically NSG&B has contributed with two primary resources that the EWC can use directly:

A Business Register Information Vocabulary: Developed through semantic alignment, this vocabulary offers standardized definitions for business data, making it suitable for machine-to-machine communication. It is essential for ensuring clarity and consistency across borders.
A common API specification: This API provides unified access to basic company information across the public business registries of all Nordic countries, reducing the need for separate integrations to each country’s business registry.

EWC’s use of the structured data from NSG&B

Michelle Ludovici, a business developer at Bolagsverket, the Swedish Companies Registration Office, and a member of EWC, highlights how NSG&B’s contributions can be seen as valuable to the current projects in the consortium: “There is a semantic group within this consortium that has already used the NSG&B's work and build upon it because they have use cases that are a little bit different, but mostly the same. One such use case currently being tested involves creating a company branch in different countries using an EU digital wallet. For this process, you need data elements about the parent company, such as its name, organization number, signatories of the company, the company address, and other basic information—all of which the NSG&B API provides. This makes the API very useful for our work”.

Michelle Ludovici further highlights that, without NSG&B’s common API specification, EWC would have needed to undertake this work on its own:

If the NSG&B had not done this API yet, then we would have to do the same work from scratch basically. So now we can build on the work that already has been done and perhaps add some more attributes to it. So that is very good for us. It saves us a lot of time.
Michelle Ludovici, a business developer at Bolagsverket, the Swedish Companies Registration Office, and a member of EWC

In addition to the API, NSG&B’s vocabulary for business register information has also proven valuable for EWC, as it proposes definitions aligned with existing harmonized terminology in EU law: “As you can imagine, each country needs to find out the answers to questions such as “what is the company address and which components does it consist of?”; “what is this NACE code and do we understand the same thing by this definition?” These very specific definitions are key for this standardization work. Now all this work has been done and has been defined by the NSG&B and there are documents that we can follow.”

Integrating Nordic innovation with EU Law: NSG&B’s role in shaping digital compliance

The significance of NSG&B’s work extends to EU legal compliance. The provisional agreement to expand the use of digital tools in the EU company law will mean that data elements provided through the NSG&B API will be partially required by law under the EU Company Law Directive. Michelle Ludovici notes: “The EU Company Law Directive requires that these data elements or attributes must be compatible with the EU digital wallet. Consequently, all company registration offices in Europe, including ours, must adhere to this law. The directive defines a European company certificate, which encompasses all the data attributes provided by the NSG&B API”.

NSG&B contributing to the EU Single Market for the digital economy

In summary, NSG&B’s contributions—particularly the API and vocabulary for business register are valuable for EWC and will provide a solid foundation for the upcoming work related to the EU digital wallet. By fostering cross-border interoperability, and alignment with the evolving EU legal landscape NSG&B’s work supports the EWC and the EU Single Market more broadly.

Learn more about the next steps for the EU digital wallet and the large-scale pilot project EWC here: https://eudiwalletconsortium.org/