A fiduciary in Zug opens a signed contract amendment from a client's German subsidiary. The signature is qualified, the chain validates, the name matches the managing director in the commercial register. Good. Then the client asks something else: that draft we emailed you in March, before the negotiation turned, can we show it existed in March? The signature doesn't answer that one.
From December 2026 the first half of that story gets much easier across the EU. The second half doesn't move at all.
The December date, and the other one that isn't December 2026
Article 5a(1) of Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, the European Digital Identity Framework that amends eIDAS, requires each Member State to provide at least one European Digital Identity Wallet within 24 months of the entry into force of the implementing acts referred to in that article and in Article 5c(6). Those acts, Regulations (EU) 2024/2977 to 2024/2982, entered into force on 24 December 2024. That puts the Member State obligation at 24 December 2026.
One thing gets garbled in retelling. The duty on private parties to accept the wallet, where strong user authentication is already required for an online service, is a separate obligation with a later date in December 2027. The two get quoted as one deadline. They are two, a year apart.
The European Commission keeps a running overview on its digital identity wallet page. Each state builds its own wallet, so clients in three countries means three apps under one framework.
What the wallet is genuinely good at
It answers one question extremely well: who is this, and is the credential real. It's issued or recognised by a Member State, bound to a verified person, presented from a device that person controls. For anyone who has spent years collecting scanned passports, that's real progress, and worth calling that without hedging.
It carries into signing too. When a wallet credential applies a qualified electronic signature, that signature has the same legal effect as a handwritten signature under EU law. A cross border mandate that needed wet ink and a courier becomes something a client finishes from a phone, at an assurance level a scanned signature never had.
The second question, which no wallet answers
Identity is not authorship. A wallet proves who holds a credential right now and, when it signs, who applied the signature. It says nothing about where the signed content came from or how long it existed before. A signing time is not a creation time.
A consultant signs a methodology document today with a wallet credential. That proves the consultant signed it today. It doesn't prove the methodology was theirs last spring, and it won't help if a former client publishes something similar next month and says they had it first.
The gap shows up where the stakes are highest: a design that gets copied, a model that turns up at a competitor, work argued over once a client relationship ends. In none of those is the contested fact who signed. It's when the work existed, and in whose hands.
Question by question
| The question being asked | What the EU Digital Identity Wallet answers | What it does not answer |
|---|---|---|
| Who is this person, and is the credential genuine? | Directly. State issued, bound to a verified individual. | Nothing missing. This is what it was built for. |
| Did this named person sign this document? | Yes. With a qualified electronic signature it carries the same legal effect as a handwritten signature under EU law. | Whether they had authority to sign, which stays a matter of mandate. |
| Has the document changed since signing? | Yes. Validation fails once the file changes. | Anything about the file before the signature was applied. |
| When did this exact file first exist? | Records the moment of signing. | Whether the content existed a day, a month or a year earlier. |
| Was this work mine before anyone else had it? | Not in scope. | Any record of priority against someone who says they got there first. |
What the wallet handles is a person and a moment of assent. What it leaves open is a file and its history.
Where Switzerland sits in this
Switzerland is not in the EU, so 24 December 2026 isn't a Swiss deadline and Swiss residents won't be issued an EU wallet. Domestically, qualified certificate services are governed by ZertES, while handwritten signature equivalence for a qualified electronic signature comes from OR Art. 14 para. 2bis rather than from ZertES itself. That distinction matters when drafting a clause on signature form, and we've set it out on our ZertES page.
From December a Swiss fiduciary with EU clients sits on both sides: EU counterparties on wallet credentials, Swiss counterparties on ZertES certificates. Neither side touches authorship.
What to do about it before December
- Split the two questions in your files. One record for who signed and when. A separate one for when the work first existed.
- Check any client facing template implying a signature proves origination or creation date. It doesn't, and the wording gets tested the first time a dispute reaches counsel.
- Ask EU clients which wallet their country is issuing and whether their signing workflow accepts it, since that's decided nationally.
- For work that would hurt to lose, put a dated record in place when it's finished, not when it's disputed. Swiss Trust Layer applies a qualified timestamp and seal to the file itself, so the date is fixed by a third party rather than by your own file metadata. Do it for drafts too, since the draft is usually what gets argued over.
The wallet is good infrastructure and it closes a gap that's been open a long time. It closes the identity gap. The date gap is a separate job, still yours to do.
