Datai and Hopae Pitch eIDAS 2.0 Onboarding Shift From Document KYC to Digital Identity Verification

Luxembourg-based consultancy Datai is positioning a partnership with digital identity vendor Hopae around helping European financial institutions reduce reliance on document-heavy KYC processes and move toward government-backed digital identity verification. Datai’s messaging frames the shift as a response to three pressures: growing fraud sophistication, rising consumer intolerance for high-friction onboarding, and the approach of European Digital Identity Wallet deployment under eIDAS 2.0.

On its Hopae partnership page, Datai presents Hopae Connect as a single-API approach designed to verify global electronic identities and wallets using standardized identity responses, supported by cryptographic and trust-framework validation. The consultancy argues that institutions should avoid building country-by-country onboarding integrations and instead adopt infrastructure that can support both national eID schemes and emerging wallet-based credentials with one integration.

Datai uses headline metrics to underscore the business case, including claims that complex KYC processes can drive 50 to 60 percent onboarding drop-off and that fraud costs could reach $58 billion annually by 2030 without modernization. The fraud figure is also referenced in Hopae’s own materials, which cite Juniper Research.

Regulatory timing is a central selling point, but the partnership materials illustrate a common gap between marketing simplifications and implementation timelines. Datai describes “mandatory compliance in 2026,” while Hopae’s own EU positioning is more specific: it says EU Member States must offer EUDI Wallets to citizens in 2026, and that regulated businesses and Very Large Online Platforms must accept the EUDI Wallet by 2027, with early adoption likely ahead of deadlines.

Datai CEO Christian Frantzen argues that common eID and KYC solutions used in Luxembourg do not fully address current fraud dynamics or the needs of internationally oriented client bases. In Datai’s framing, Hopae Connect is intended to reduce the need for multiple transformation programs by serving as a foundation that supports cross-border onboarding, helps institutions prepare for future wallet acceptance requirements, and provides an alternative to document capture and manual review processes.

The partnership reflects an accelerating push to treat government-backed digital identity as an onboarding primitive, rather than an optional supplement to document verification. The extent to which financial institutions adopt wallet and eID verification at scale will depend on national rollout maturity, acceptance obligations, and how well “single API” claims translate into practical interoperability.

Sources: Datai, Hopae

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By the ID Tech Editorial Team