With each passing year, the volume of international trade in goods and services keeps rising. With all of this trade, however, comes an associated cost. This not only involves some unavoidable components like shipping, but also costs incurred due to inefficiency in other systems like customs clearances and trust between the trading parties.

The EU has launched a number of initiatives to realize the aim of creating a unified Digital Single Market. The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) is a funding instrument that provides the primary thrust for this initiative. The CEF uses certain underlying building blocks (known as Digital Service Infrastructures) to achieve this objective of providing an interconnected and unified marketplace.

The eIDAS Regulation lays the groundwork for creating a robust digital identity framework. The idea is to provide EU citizens with a secure, robust and universal electronic identification that they can use to access private and public services anywhere within the EU.

One sector that is lapping up the new opportunities that eIDAS offers is banking. 

The CEF building blocks of the digital service infrastructure, as defined under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) cover essential components like user identification and authentication, communication, invoicing, payment and electronic service delivery.