Examining the Impact of eIDAS

In Part 1 of our series exploring the wide footprint of the eIDAS regulation, we looked at things like PSD2, the European Citizen’s Initiative, and the eHealth Governance Initiative. However, these are just a few examples of the many applications of the eIDAS mechanisms. In this part, we examine some other interesting applications, including Social Security and the prevention of Money Laundering.

AML5 - 5th Anti Money Laundering Directive

Anti-Money Laundering efforts play a crucial role in hindering criminal and terrorist operations on multiple levels. One of the major challenges here is the need for continuous monitoring of transactions for suspicious activity without affecting customer experience.

The tools supplied by eIDAS significantly improve compliance with AML Directives. This improves the customer experience, reduces the banks' costs, and meets the requirements of the regulators – all in one fell swoop. eIDAS enabled tools to ensure that money laundering, terror financing, and other such activities can be detected early and with more accuracy and less effort.

SUP - Directive on single-member private limited liability companies

As the name suggests, this directive covers entities with only a sole member, which might be the case due to all the shares eventually being held by a single person or something that was decided at inception. Relevant records of such a person must be kept per regulatory requirements. This is where eIDAS comes into play yet again by providing a pan-European electronic identification/ authentication mechanism.

ESSN - European Social Security Number

There has been a marked increase in labor mobility across the EU. This necessitates the creation of a system that can protect the social rights of all individuals moving across national borders. The ESSN aims to modernize the way social security is managed across Europe. The idea is to build a system that can identify European citizens across national borders for social security coordination and service delivery. ESSN would significantly rely on the digital approach, and eIDAS again plays a crucial role in enabling this system. eIDAS has been designed to allow for the cross-border use of electronic IDs, and such features would be greatly leveraged by the ESSN initiative.

Conclusion

eIDAS plays a crucial part in nearly every digital service delivery project, from healthcare to government and payments to social security. It provides powerful and secure tools that can be used by the government, as well as private and public-sector entities, to provide the level of service that European citizens have come to expect.

By standardizing the best practices for identification and authentication under eIDAS, the European Commission has eliminated the need for this issue to be grappled with when planning each individual project. This “building block” approach has definitely led to faster implementation and rollout of various EU initiatives.

References and Further Reading

REGULATION (EU) No 910/2014 on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the internal market and repealing Directive 1999/93/EC (2014) by the European Parliament and the European Commission

eIDAS & 4th Anti-Money Laundering Directive - a short update (2017), by Andrea Servida
Directive (EU) 2015/849 on the prevention of the use of the financial system for the purposes of money laundering or terrorist financing (2015), by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union
INCEPTION IMPACT ASSESSMENT European Social Security Number (11/2017), by the European Commission
Directive 2009/102/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 September 2009 in the area of company law on single-member private limited liability companies (2009), by the European Parliament and the European Council

Selected articles eIDAS (2014-today), by Gaurav Sharma, Guillaume Forget, Stefan Hansen, Michal Tabor , Peter Landrock, Torben Pedersen, Dawn M. Turner, and more

Selected articles on Electronic Signing and Digital Signatures (2014-today), by Ashiq JA, Guillaume Forget, Jan Kjaersgaard , Peter Landrock, Torben Pedersen, Dawn M. Turner, Tricia Wittig and more
REGULATION (EU) 2016/679 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation) (2016), by the European Parliament and the European Council
Proposal for a REGULATION concerning the respect for private life and the protection of personal data in electronic communications and repealing Directive 2002/58/EC (Regulation on Privacy and Electronic Communications), (2017), by the European Parliament and the European Council

eIDAS & 4th Anti-Money Laundering Directive - a short update(2017), by Andrea Servida
Directive (EU) 2015/849 on the prevention of the use of the financial system for the purposes of money laundering or terrorist financing (2015), by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union

Recommendations for the Security of Internet Payments (Final Version) (2013), by the European Central Bank
Draft NIST Special Publication 800-63-3: Digital Authentication Guideline (2016), by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA.
NIST Special Publication 800-63-2: Electronic Authentication Guideline (2013), by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA.
Security Controls Related to Internat Banking Services (2016), Hong Kong Monetary Authority