Into the Apps We Use

Germany plans to launch its digital identity wallet in January. Deutsche Post, the banking industry and a rollout in Italy offer a glimpse of how people might come to use digital credentials through apps they already know.

Open a bank account on your phone and you may be asked to photograph your passport, take a selfie and wait while the bank checks both. Now imagine the bank offers another route. Its app shows you which identity details it needs, your digital wallet asks you to approve sharing them, and you return to the bank to finish the application.

If you already have a wallet set up, that could save you time. If you have to download one and prove your identity before you can get back to the application, the passport photo may suddenly seem like the easier option. That’s the choice Europe’s digital identity wallet will face one customer at a time.

Deutsche Post gives the wallet a job to do

Deutsche Post is bringing wallet-based identification into a service companies already use. Its POSTIDENT software development kit lets businesses add European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI Wallet) identification to their own apps. Deutsche Post has been testing in Germany’s wallet sandbox since December 2025. Businesses can offer the wallet check alongside options such as video identification or the German online ID function, giving customers another way to complete the same application.

Germany’s state wallet, d-you, is due to launch as a standalone app in January 2027. In the POSTIDENT model, the company’s app starts the check and the wallet holds the credential and asks the customer what to share. That gives someone a reason to open d-you at the point they need it. For the company, it means adding a new way to verify identity to a process its customers already know.

How much of the wallet could live inside the app?

The Association of German Banks has argued that banking apps could help drive adoption because they are already installed on millions of devices. It proposed making it possible to integrate EUDI Wallet functions into those apps through a software development kit. Mobey Forum’s Digital Identity Expert Group makes a related commercial case. Integrating wallet functions into an app customers already use gives a bank a way to stay involved when those customers need to prove who they are. For the customer, the benefit has to show up in the task itself.

Germany’s EUDI Wallet blueprint envisages wallet solutions integrated into existing banking, insurance or airline apps, subject to the same certification and interoperability requirements. At the eIDAS Summit, AUTHADA and Deutsche Telekom Security outlined a modular software kit that could bring selected wallet functions directly into an existing app. That goes a step beyond POSTIDENT. One approach adds a way for the service to ask for proof. The other brings some of the wallet’s own functions into the service app.

Italy put digital documents in an app people already had

Italy has already put digital documents inside IO, its existing public services app. Users can add documents such as a driving licence, a health card or a disability card. In February 2026, Italy’s digital transformation department reported 10.1 million IT-Wallet activations and 17.3 million documents added. A familiar public services app gave the feature a route to millions of people. How a separate app would have performed remains an open question.

Those figures tell us how many people activated the feature and how many documents they added. For a bank, airline or mobile operator, the next question is what happens when someone actually needs to present one.

Give people a reason to use it twice

Account opening gives a digital bank a clear first test. Do more people finish the application when they can use a wallet? Do fewer cases need manual review? Can the bank keep the fraud checks it relies on? A verified credential can supply evidence about who is applying. The bank still has to decide whether it has enough information to open the account.

Payments set a higher bar. If you already approve a payment with a tap in your banking app, what would make you reach for a wallet instead? As we explored in our SCARLET coverage, using an external wallet for payment authentication also raises a question about who handles the dispute when something goes wrong. Account opening gives banks a more immediate way to see whether customers value the option.

The second use might come months later. A mobile operator could ask for verified identity details during SIM registration. An airline could let you share travel document details at check-in instead of typing them in again. EU pilots have explored both areas. The attraction is easy to see when the wallet saves a step in something you already need to do.

Germany will be able to count how many people download d-you. The companies that build it into their services can ask something closer to everyday use. When customers have a choice, how many pick the wallet, finish what they came to do and choose it again the next time?