European Business Wallet: More Than a Digital Wallet for Companies
Oliver Wieck, Secretary General of ICC Germany and Chair of the ICC DSI Legal Reform Advisory Board, explains why the European Business Wallet is far more than another digital tool – and what matters now in its design.
Author: Oliver Wieck, Secretary General of ICC Germany and Chair of the ICC DSI Legal Reform Advisory Board
Date: 2026-08-17
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Oliver Wieck, Secretary General of ICC Germany and Chair of the ICC DSI Legal Reform Advisory Board, explains why the European Business Wallet is far more than another digital tool – and what matters now in its design.
As the German national committee of the International Chamber of Commerce, ICC Germany represents the interests of companies in international trade – from trade finance to the digitalization of cross-border transactions. From this perspective, we are following the work on the European Business Wallet (EBW) with great interest, because it addresses exactly what companies doing business abroad have been complaining about for years: having to repeatedly and laboriously prove their own identity to authorities and business partners in every single member state.
The European Business Wallet is not just another digital wallet. It enables credentials that have been verified once, such as licenses, certificates, or powers of attorney, to be reused across the EU, rather than having to be obtained anew for every transaction.
Why is the name "wallet" misleading?
Because this isn't about storing documents digitally, but about a paradigm shift: away from repeated individual checks, toward credentials that are verified once and can be used again. The European Commission proposed the EBW as digital infrastructure under its Digital Package 2025, enabling companies to identify themselves, authenticate, and exchange data in a legally secure way across the EU. For small and medium-sized enterprises that cannot afford large compliance departments, this is a tangible competitive advantage.
Why does corporate identity matter so much?
For a business wallet to be more than just another app, it needs to be built on a reliable identity for legal entities. Within the EU, the wallet architecture makes this link between a company and its representatives digitally verifiable – a step forward that we at ICC Germany explicitly welcome. But the real question from the perspective of international trade is: what happens at the EU's external borders?
For business relationships with partners outside the EU, a standard is needed that banks, authorities, and companies in other regions of the world already know and accept. This is where the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) comes in – an ISO-standardized, globally unique identifier that unambiguously links a company to its reference data, regardless of the country in which it is registered or with whom it does business.
The verifiable LEI (vLEI) adds a further layer: it is designed to cryptographically verify the identity of a company, the identity of the person acting on its behalf, and the scope of that person's authority to represent it – the same link that the wallet architecture provides within the EU but extended beyond the EU's borders.
What matters from a business perspective right now?
Drawing on my work at ICC Germany, as Chair of the ICC DSI Legal Reform Advisory Board, and from exchanges with companies of all sizes, I see three priorities in particular:
Embed globally recognized identifiers. The LEI and vLEI are already established, legally recognized standards today. Integrating them into the Business Wallet from the outset creates international connectivity from day one, rather than retrofitting it later.
Technology neutrality. Multiple wallet providers will operate in parallel. Interoperability between them must not be optional but mandatory from the start, or new silos will emerge instead of a single, unified market.
Fraud prevention from day one. A wallet that bundles access to company credentials and powers of attorney is also an attractive target for attackers. Robust safeguards need to be built in from the beginning, not added as an afterthought.
What happens next?
The European Commission estimates the savings potential of the European Business Wallet at several billion euros in administrative costs, plus significantly larger annual savings for companies through leaner processes. These figures are impressive, but they will only become reality if the wallet is designed from the outset as trustworthy, verifiable, and international infrastructure – not as a European silo.
That is why GLEIF, together with partners from business and government, contributed to the consultation on the design of the EBW. On June 9, 2026, the Council of the EU adopted its negotiating position; trilogue negotiations with the European Parliament are now beginning, with the goal of reaching a political agreement by the end of the year. The coming months will show whether a good idea can be turned into infrastructure that is interoperable beyond Europe and that companies can rely on.
A European Business Wallet that lives up to this ambition would truly be more than a digital wallet: it would be a foundation of trust for global trade – and that is exactly what ICC and ICC Germany stand for: facilitating trade across borders, systems, and legal jurisdictions.
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Oliver Wieck has been Secretary General of ICC Germany since October 2013. The ICC is the only global business organization with a network of national chapters in more than 90 countries. Its focus is the development of standards and rules for international trade. In the ICC's Digital Standards Initiative (DSI), Mr. Wieck chairs the Legal Reform Advisory Board, which works to align legal frameworks for the digitization of trade around the world. From 2008 to 2013, Mr. Wieck was Head of the Foreign Trade Policy Department at the Federation of German Industries (BDI), focusing on international trade issues, transatlantic economic relations, export financing, foreign trade law and customs issues.
