The Digital Credentials for Europe initiative is advancing towards its conclusion, focusing on the European Digital Identity Wallet's application in education and social security. As the project enters its final phase, Atos plays a crucial role by providing essential technological solutions. This Large Scale Pilot aims to enhance interoperability, security, and trust across Member States, aligning with the EU's Digital Decade objective
Digital Credentials for Europe, a cross-border Large Scale Pilot co-funded under the Digital Europe Programme, is nearing its conclusion. This project evaluates the benefits of the European Digital Identity Wallet in strategic real-life scenarios within the Education and Social Security domains, ahead of its EU-wide rollout by the end of 2026. As the initiative enters its final phase in Q2 2025, multiple pilot use cases are being launched with real users, generating valuable results and feedback.
With the project set to end in July, Atos-provided tools are nearly fully deployed across 30 issuance and verification services from academic and professional institutions in 10 Member States. The pilot aims to engage at least 1,000 students, generating over 1,500 transactions and collecting crucial feedback for the European Commission and Member States to prepare for the eIDAS 2.0 ecosystem's production deployment by the end of 2026.
The R&D Spain Identity Management and Privacy Team is supplying core technological components, including Issuer, Verifier, and web-based Graphical User Interfaces for system administrators and end-users. These components are based on Eviden’s uSelf Self-Sovereign Identity EBSI-conformant wallet, supporting partners in the cross-border Educational and Professional Qualifications Pilot that relies on EBSI’s distributed trust infrastructure while being aligned with the latest technical specifications of the European Digital Identity Cooperation Group.
Among the benefits being validated are enhanced interoperability for educational information exchange, increased security, trust, and cross-border recognition, all under the control of wallet holders. The initiative also facilitates seamless onboarding and governance management for stakeholders. By making professional qualifications verifiable, interoperable, and trusted, the project aims to expand Europe’s talent pool, contributing to the EU’s Digital Decade targets.
Atos has thus become a key technical provider, offering a comprehensive toolkit to support digital credentials under the eIDAS 2.0 Regulation. This toolkit minimizes efforts for piloting agents by enabling secure and automatic deployment of docker-based technical components and facilitating integration with existing infrastructures. Atos components support the issuance, retrieval, and automatic verification of eight fully digitalized identity and student mobility credentials, including general identity and specific educational and professional identities. Additionally, 12 types of attestations are provided, ranging from higher education diplomas/supplement and degree certificates to micro-credentials and regulated professions achievement credentials. Aprovided as eIDAS 2.0 Electronic Attestations of Attributes (EAAs) and form part of an EAA Sectorial Catalogue for Education and Professional Qualifications, a major project outcome to be published soon.
All these attestations are designed for cross-border use, fully aligned with different standards and legally verified, most notably eIDAS 2.0 Person Identity Data and EDC-W3C, a W3C-VCDM serialisation of the European Learning Model (ELM) provided by DG EMPL (Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion) and registered in EBSI decentralized registers trust model as well as the organisations acting as Issuers.
The toolkit and all project documentation will soon be made public in DC4EU’s project Github.
