What will shape the trust services market in 2026? Key topics and expert perspectives
Everything indicates that 2026 will be the year of the European Digital Identity Wallet. Member States are obliged to implement it, but simply “launching the wallet” will not be enough. Its real value will depend on whether it can be easily recognised and verified in the services people and businesses use on a daily basis. That is why, as Michał Tabor, an expert at Obserwatorium.biz, explains: “The most important direction for the market will be preparing not just the wallets themselves, but, above all, the relying parties – the entities that are expected to accept the wallet. In practice, the relying parties will be the greatest challenge. They need technology to verify the wallet, as well as the appropriate certificates and formal ‘capability’ to operate within the wallet ecosystem. Not every bank, insurer, operator, or online retailer will want or be able to go through this process on their own.
As a result, the role of intermediaries responsible for integration, maintenance, and compliance will grow significantly. This is a natural space for trust service providers: they can become a ‘single window’ for relying parties, assisting with registration, issuing access certificates to the wallet, and supplying ready-made components to support wallet operations in business processes.
Importantly, the ability to recognise the wallet will become a prerequisite for providing other trust services, particularly qualified ones. If a trust service provider cannot work securely and efficiently with the wallet, it will be harder for them to develop services based on identification, signatures, or other processes that require a high level of trust. In 2026, the market will therefore invest heavily in ‘wallet readiness’ on the side of providers and their clients – less in slides and declarations, more in functioning implementations, testing, and repeatable onboarding processes.
A second major topic will be the ‘free signature’. eIDAS 2 anticipates that qualified signatures in the wallet model should be available free of charge for private use. This creates a new economic tension: the market must find a model in which users can access the service easily and without cost barriers, while providers have the means to maintain quality, security, audits, and development. In 2026, discussions about how to organise such a model will be crucial: how to limit abuses of free access, how to distinguish private from commercial use, how to fund maintenance and development, and how to structure cooperation between the state and the market. This will be one of the main factors affecting the pace of qualified signature adoption in the coming years.
The third direction will be electronic attestations of attributes (EAA), understood primarily as building readiness among trust service providers. In 2026, the market will probably not yet issue electronic attestations of attributes directly to wallets at production scale, but there will be strong pressure to ‘show that it works’. Therefore, in the first stage, electronic attestations may also be issued outside the wallet — for example, as a file or directly as a PDF document — as a simpler, faster-to-implement transitional option. Due to market uncertainty and the need to demonstrate readiness, the first solutions may be more closed: the trust service provider will act both as the issuer of the attribute credential and as the relying party verifying it within its own processes. This stage will allow policies, processes, tools, and responsibilities to be tested before the market moves to broader, multi-party interoperability.
At the same time, collaboration with the financial sector and support for its processes with European digital identity tools will be important – particularly where they genuinely reduce risks (e.g., identity and entitlement verification, abuse prevention) and improve operational efficiency and compliance. In practice, the financial sector may be one of the first areas where ‘readiness’ translates into concrete implementations and measurable results.
In summary: 2026 will certainly be the year of ‘wallet readiness’ – the market’s ability to recognise and verify it on the side of relying parties. It will also be the year of organising the economics of the free signature and preparing for attributes. Trust service providers can play a central role in this scenario if they offer a simple, repeatable, and secure way to deploy the wallet in commercial services – as both a product and a service, not just regulatory compliance.”
But these are not the only forecasts. What else do trust services market experts have to say?
🔹Andras A. Barsi:
- 2026 will be a decisive year for Europe’s digital rulebook and infrastructure. A sovereign European digital economy cannot exist without a well-defined, interoperable digital infrastructure. The key challenge for 2026 will be whether EU policy choices strengthen competitiveness (as described in point 2) or unintentionally burden businesses through fragmented, complex, and overlapping regulation.
- Europe’s core digital values will be tested against global competitiveness pressures. Data protection, privacy, and trust are unique European assets that must not be compromised. In an increasingly turbulent geopolitical environment, 2026 will be critical for proving that these values — embedded in trust services and digital wallets — can be leveraged as competitive advantages through a consistent, efficient, and scalable legal framework rather than seen as constraints.
- The Business Wallet will emerge as the real growth engine of the European digital economy. While the EUDI Wallet for citizens will become visible in 2026, the Business Wallet will be more decisive for economic impact. Businesses are natural adopters of digital technology, and a well-designed Business Wallet — enabling cross-border identity, signatures, attributes, and qualified e-Delivery — can unlock rapid digital growth if policy focus and adoption accelerate early.
- Trust services will become a default building block of EU policymaking. In 2026, trust services are likely to move from a sectoral topic to a horizontal policy instrument. By design, they provide guarantees such as strong authentication, non-repudiation, confidentiality, and data protection across all industries. Policymakers will increasingly rely on eIDAS as a principle of presumed compliance, embedding trust services by default wherever these guarantees are required in legislation.
🔹Paweł Wojtaszyk:
“The year 2026 will mark a transition from regulatory preparation to the actual operational implementation of the new legal frameworks. The European Digital Identity Wallet will begin to operate as a practical component of the digital services ecosystem, and its effectiveness will depend on efficient integration with public and commercial services.
At the same time, cybersecurity regulations such as DORA, NIS2 and the amendment to the National Cybersecurity System will significantly increase requirements related to cyber threats. In 2026, organisations will be assessed not on declared compliance, but on actual cyber resilience, including supply chain security and incident response capabilities. As a result, trust services will become an integral part of company processes and organisational security strategies.
Another important trend will be the growing role of artificial intelligence in the area of security. AI will become both a tool for strengthening threat detection and automating responses, and a new source of risk that requires oversight, auditability and regulatory compliance”.
🔹Grzegorz Wójcik:
“The year 2026 will mark the moment when digital trust ceases to be perceived through the lens of complex regulations and instead becomes the foundation of an intuitive user experience. In my view, three phenomena will be key:
- Democratisation of e-identity through EUDI and government applications:
The implementation ofeIDAS 2.0 standards and the success of solutions such as mObywatel (the Polish e-wallet) will make the identity wallet a widely used verification tool in citizen – business interactions. This will pave the way for near-instant KYC/KYB processes across the entire European Union, removing barriers to cross-border trade.
- Automation of e-signatures as the standard:
We are approaching an era in which more than 90% of qualified e-signatures will be issued fully automatically. The direct integration of trust services with business processes and the systems that support them (ERP/CRM/HRM) will mean that the qualified signature will no longer be a separate action, but a natural element of cloud-based authorisation, available with a single click. - Enterprise-grade security (NIS2/DORA):
New regulations, such as NIS2 and the EU Cyber Security Act, will force market leaders to adopt comprehensive document management systems. In 2026, those organisations that succeed will be the ones able to combine the highest standards of infrastructure security with“invisible tech” — technology that protects processes while remaining almost imperceptible to the end user”.
Publication date: 16.02.2026