Romania pilots EU Digital Identity Wallet for payments
Banca Transilvania and BPC have completed Romania’s first pilot payment using the EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW), letting customers authenticate with their digital ID instead of a card or password.
In a milestone for the European digital identity ecosystem, Banca Transilvania and payments-tech firm BPC have completed the first pilot in Romania using the EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW) for a real-money transaction.
The initiative lets a cardholder authenticate a purchase using the wallet rather than a conventional one-time password or card reader.
The pilot forms part of a large-scale testbed led by the European Commission under the eIDAS 2 Regulation, which requires all EU banks to accept the wallet for strong customer authentication and KYC (know-your-customer) purposes by 2027.
Banca Transilvania’s Deputy CEO Retail Banking, Oana Ilaş, described the project as a historic step toward a unified European digital identities framework that enhances interoperability, inclusivity and banking access.
From a digital governance and payments policy perspective, this pilot is significant. It shows how national banking systems are beginning to integrate digital-ID wallets into card and account-based flows, potentially reducing reliance on legacy authentication mechanisms (such as SMS OTP or hardware tokens) that are vulnerable to fraud.
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