Ljubljana: A Slovenian logistics operator opening a subsidiary in three neighbouring countries will, on current practice, submit the same certificate of incorporation, the same beneficial ownership declaration and the same tax registration to three different administrations, in three formats, none of which will accept the others’ output. The European Business Wallet is the Commission’s answer to that repetition, and on 10 September it cleared its first parliamentary hurdle.
The Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy adopted its position on the proposal, formally titled the Digital Identity for Legal Persons, and authorised the opening of negotiations with the Council. The instrument was tabled in November 2025 as a business-facing counterpart to the digital identity wallet already being rolled out for individuals. Its premise is the once-only principle, long recited in EU digital policy and rarely implemented: a company should provide a verified document to a public administration once, and every other administration in the Union should be able to accept it without asking again.
The mechanics are less exciting than the ambition. A company obtains a wallet containing cryptographically verifiable attestations about itself, its legal form, its representatives, its authorisations, and presents those attestations when dealing with authorities anywhere in the single market. The receiving administration verifies the credential rather than the paper. Applied at scale, this is the difference between a fortnight of notarised translations and an afternoon.
What makes the file politically awkward is not the technology but its neighbours. The wallet sits alongside the EU Inc. proposal published in March 2026, which would create a twenty-eighth corporate form existing in parallel to the national company forms of every member state and designed to be incorporated digitally and operated across borders without re-registration. The two measures are separable in law and inseparable in effect: a harmonised company form is considerably more attractive if the credentials that prove its existence are recognised everywhere, and a wallet is considerably more useful if there is a company form it can describe in a single vocabulary.
That combination has drawn a familiar objection. National business registers are revenue-generating, staffed and politically attached to their supervisory ministries, and a Union framework that lets a company bypass a national counter is not received in every capital as pure administrative simplification. Several member states have argued in Council working parties that recognition obligations must not be allowed to dilute national verification standards, particularly where anti-money-laundering checks are concerned.
The committee’s mandate does not settle the question that will dominate the negotiations, which is who pays. Building the interfaces that let existing national registers issue and read wallet credentials is a member state obligation under the proposal, arriving at a moment when the same administrations are absorbing the costs of the individual identity wallet, the customs data hub and a series of reporting systems attached to sustainability legislation. Industry federations that support the substance have been notably quiet on the implementation bill.
Talks with the Council are expected to open once the Council fixes its own position. Given the linkage to EU Inc., which remains at an earlier stage, the likeliest outcome is that the wallet advances first and arrives in force before the corporate form it was partly designed to serve.
