With the advent of comprehensive regulatory standards for remote electronic signatures within the EU, it is now possible for international contracts and transactions to get signed without delay, saving thousands of €/£/$ in travel expenses, reducing paperwork and enabling the processing of documents more easily, securely and environmentally friendly.

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. 

Through many parts of the world, including the European Union and the United States, digital signing has been adopted as a way to implement electronic signatures that are considered legally binding. This article introduces digital signatures, digital certificates and the relationship between digital signatures and PKCS #7.

Last November saw the adoption of the Delegated Regulation on Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) by the European Commission. The objective of this regulation is to provide for Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) and establish secure channels of communications.

The European Commission has been hard at work pushing out policies and guidelines to address the few remaining issues in its move towards a truly unified and digital Single Market.

The PSD2 Directive opens a considerable market for new solutions in e-banking, account information services and payment initiation services.

 "Banks aren’t places to store money anymore, banks are places to store data". This was the statement made by David Birch at the 2017 ISSE Conference in Brussels.