This July, Digidentity turns 18. In most of Europe, that is the age at which a person is legally recognised as an adult, the moment when your identity carries full weight. For a company that has spent those 18 years helping people prove who they are, the coincidence is hard to ignore. Time for a reflection on what has changed in our industry and what the next phase demands from all of us.
Trust was always at the heart of it all
When Digidentity started in 2008, digital identity verification was a niche problem. Most organisations still relied on physical documents and in-person checks. The idea that you could verify someone's identity remotely, with the same level of assurance as a face-to-face interaction, was met with scepticism. Eighteen years later, the technology has advanced enormously. But trust remains the central challenge, it has just changed shape.
What has changed over the last 18 years
Three shifts stand out when we look back at how our industry has evolved.
1. Identity moved from a back-office function to a front-door experience.
In 2008, identity verification was something that happened after a customer had already decided to sign up. It was a compliance step, buried in onboarding flows, tolerated rather than valued. When we built the technology behind DigiD, the Dutch government's digital identity system now used by 17 million citizens, this shift became real. Identity was no longer a formality buried in a process; it became the process. Today, the identity check is often the first meaningful interaction a person has with an organisation. It sets the tone for the entire relationship. Companies that treat it as a checkbox are losing customers to those that treat it as a moment of trust.
2. Regulation started leading
For years, the technology was ahead of the rules. Early movers in digital identity operated in regulatory grey areas, building solutions and hoping the frameworks would follow. When we pioneered Qualified Cloud Signing in 2011, there was no standard for it. The European Committee for Standardization (CEN) later approached us to use our product as the foundation for establishing the industry-wide standard. That is a telling example of how the dynamic worked: the technology came first, and the regulation followed. With eIDAS, PSD2, and now eIDAS2, the European Union has moved from catching up to actively shaping the future. That is a significant shift, and one that benefits everyone in the ecosystem.
3. The conversation shifted
The technical proof of concept is long settled. We proved that ourselves when we became one of the identity providers for the UK's GOV.UK Verify framework in 2013, verifying more than 9.6 million citizens. And in 2020, when demand for digital identities surged overnight, our platform went from processing around 8,000 identities per day to over 150,000. The questions now are about interoperability, inclusion, and governance. How do we make sure a digital identity issued in the Netherlands is recognised and trusted in Portugal? How do we ensure that people who are less digitally confident are not left behind? These are harder questions than the technical ones we started with.
What the next phase demands
The European Digital Identity Wallet will be the defining infrastructure project for our industry over the coming years. It is not simply a new product or a new regulation. It is a fundamental change in how identity works: from centralised verification to user-held credentials, from one-off checks to reusable, portable proof.
Digidentity has been part of this from the start. In 2022, we joined the EU Digital Wallet Consortium as a partner and industry expert for the large-scale pilots. That work builds directly on our own wallet technology, which traces back to the virtual smartcard we patented in our first year. For companies like ours, the wallet changes the role we play. We are no longer just verifying identity on behalf of organisations. We are helping to build the trust framework that makes the entire system work: issuing credentials, ensuring they meet the required assurance levels, and making the experience simple enough that people actually want to use it.
This demands a level of rigour and responsibility that goes beyond what most technology companies are used to. When you are part of the trust infrastructure, every decision about architecture, security, and user experience has consequences that ripple across the ecosystem.
Earning the next 18 years
Digidentity has spent 18 years building trust, one verification at a time. From a small team developing DigiD, to a visit to 10 Downing Street, to co-authoring research for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on remote identity proofing, and now to shaping the EU Digital Identity Wallet. We have worked with governments, regulated industries, and millions of individuals across Europe and beyond. We have watched this industry grow from a niche concern into critical infrastructure, and we are proud of the part we have played in that.
There is a new frontier already taking shape. We are entering the era of AI agents: software that acts on our behalf, makes decisions, and transacts at a scale no human can match. That raises a question we are uniquely built to answer: who is real, and who is an agent? Telling a human apart from an AI is fast becoming one of the most important trust problems of our time. And agents themselves need an identity too: verifiable, accountable, and bound to the person or organisation they act for. Giving both people and their agents a trusted identity is exactly the kind of problem we started Digidentity to solve.
Looking ahead, we are genuinely optimistic. The challenges are real, but so is the momentum. The European Digital Identity Wallet, stronger regulatory frameworks, and a growing public expectation for privacy and control are all moving in the right direction. The foundation is there.
We will keep doing what we have done for the past 18 years: building, improving, and earning trust through the work itself. The best is still ahead of us.