“Meet the People of Aptitude” introduces the experts and innovators working behind the Aptitude project, one of Europe’s large-scale pilots testing the European Digital Identity Wallet in real-life conditions.
In this interview, we meet Luca Vallone, who leads Technical Standards and Specifications at Aptitude. His work sits at the heart of making the European Digital Identity Wallet technically reliable and consistent across all Member States. For Luca, the goal is clear: every wallet issued across Europe must speak the same language, so that citizens can use it seamlessly wherever they are.
What is the main role of Technical Standards and Specifications within the Aptitude project?
“Technical Standards and Specifications is the backbone of the Aptitude project. The aim is to deliver the technical specifications gathered from each use case and from standards, and to ensure interoperability among Member States.”
What are the main challenges in your area of responsibility?
“We have to deal with more than 30 organisations from about 13 Member States. The main challenge is to gather requirements from all use cases and to collect inputs from all evolving standards in Europe. So the main challenge is to ensure continuous alignment to guarantee interoperability throughout the project.”
What technical standards are you defining to ensure interoperability across Europe?
“We are releasing technical profiles and specifications for credentials from different use cases, as well as technical specifications for the trust framework infrastructure. We would like to release these specifications by request for comments and we aim to include them in future versions of the Architecture Reference Framework.”
How can we guarantee compatibility between existing national systems?
“We would like to run several interoperability tests among Member States, both through peer-to-peer tests and through an interoperability testbed that we are releasing to assure compliance from each Member State with the EUDI Wallet specification.”
Why is this technical harmonisation critical for the success of the European wallet?
“For the success of the project it is important that each Member State speaks the same language as the other. Each credential must be recognised by every Member State, and each Member State has to trust it.”
The Aptitude project brings together partners from 13 EU Member States and Ukraine to test the European Digital Identity Wallet in real-life scenarios such as travel, payments and digital services. The goal is to make digital identity secure, trusted and citizen-controlled, while ensuring services can work seamlessly across borders.
Learn more about the Aptitude Consortium: https://aptitude.digital-identity-wallet.eu/our-consortium/
