The European Union and Japan have completed a pilot demonstrating that a European Digital Identity Wallet and a Japanese counterpart can issue and verify each other’s credentials, a technical proof that identity documents can move between two regions built on different rules.
A new report on the EU-Japan Interoperability Pilot describes tests using academic credentials as the sample document. In a controlled sandbox, a prototype EU Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW) interacted with issuing and verifying parties set up by Japan, while a Japanese wallet did the same with counterparts in the EU. Four scenarios worked in both directions: a student in one region could be issued a learning credential from an issuer in the other and store it in their home wallet, and could present a credential held in their wallet to a verifier such as a university abroad.
The point of the exercise was to see whether credentials could be issued, stored, presented, and verified across jurisdictions whose technical and governance frameworks were designed independently. The pilot concluded that they can, using established international standards, and that secure, privacy-preserving exchange is viable even when the two sides run different trust architectures. In other words, interoperability does not require the regions to adopt a single shared framework, only to align on common protocols.
The work supports a Memorandum of Cooperation on Digital Identities and Trust Services that the EU and Japan’s Digital Agency signed in April 2024, aimed at enabling what officials call data free flow with trust between the two economies. The report notes that the biggest remaining hurdles are not technical but legal, specifically the mutual recognition and trust frameworks that would give a cross-border credential legal standing.
The pilot is one strand of the Large Scale Pilots testing real-world uses of the EU wallet, whose domestic rollout is accelerating as member states stand up their systems, with Malta among the latest to open a 15.7 million euro EUDI wallet tender. The cross-border ambition also parallels standards work beyond Europe, including the ITU’s newly opened effort on identity and trust for humans and AI agents.
Academic credentials made a low-stakes starting point, but the same machinery underpins higher-value documents, and a working cross-border model for one credential type is a template others can follow once the legal recognition catches up.
Sources: European Commission
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By Cass Kennedy
