A digital credential that lets a company prove who it is to any public authority in the Union has moved a step closer to law. The European Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy adopted its position on the European Business Wallet on 10 September by 64 votes to seven with four abstentions, and voted at the same time to open negotiations with the Council. The mandate was announced to the plenary, clearing the way for trilogues.
The margin tells you something. Files that touch company law and digital identity usually attract a substantial bloc of opposition from one flank or another. Sixty-four to seven is the sort of result a committee produces when the underlying idea has stopped being contested and the argument has moved on to implementation.
The concept is deliberately narrow. The wallet is a secure container in which a company holds verified attributes about itself: registration details, mandates, authorisations, certificates of compliance. It can present those attributes to a public authority in another member state, exchange authenticated documents, and complete administrative procedures without the paper trail that cross-border activity currently requires. The intended saving is not glamorous. It is the elimination of apostilles, certified translations, and the repeated re-proving of facts that are already recorded in a national register somewhere.
Parliament’s amendments concentrated on smaller firms. The committee text pushes for affordable and user-friendly solutions and inserts explicit consideration of what a business with no compliance department can realistically operate. That is the right instinct and also the standard failure mode of European digital infrastructure. Large companies with in-house legal teams will adopt any credential the Union creates because the cross-border savings are material. A firm of fifteen people will adopt it only if the onboarding takes an afternoon and costs nothing, and if it does not, the wallet becomes an instrument of consolidation rather than a levelling one.
The file belongs to a wider construction. The Commission presented the wallet alongside its proposals for what has become known as the twenty-eighth regime, an optional European company form intended to let start-ups and scale-ups operate under a single set of rules on company law, insolvency, labour law and tax rather than twenty-seven. The associated EU Inc. proposal promises registration within forty-eight hours for no more than one hundred euro, fully digital. None of that works without a credential the authorities in every member state will accept, which is why the wallet has moved faster than the regime it serves.
The Council agreed its general approach earlier this year, which means the trilogues open with both sides having positions rather than aspirations. The likely friction points are predictable enough. Governments guard their national registers and the fees attached to them. Parliament will press on data minimisation and on who may query what. And the question of whether use of the wallet is genuinely optional, or becomes a practical prerequisite for dealing with administrations that have retired their old channels, is the kind of issue that gets settled in a recital and litigated for a decade.
The deeper test is not legal. Europe has built credential infrastructure before and watched it go unused because the authorities on the receiving end were not obliged to accept it, or were not technically capable of doing so. A wallet that a company can fill but cannot spend is worse than no wallet at all, because it consumes the goodwill that the next attempt would need. Whatever emerges from trilogue will be judged on whether a tax office in one member state actually processes a credential issued in another, on the first Monday it is asked to.
