Germany names its EUDI wallet "d-you" and fixes a 2 January 2027 launch with about 40 partners, banks and HDE among them

The Federal Ministry for Digital Affairs and Modernisation (BMDS) presented the name and logo of Germany's implementation of the European Digital Identity Wallet: it is called "d-you" and goes live on 2 January 2027, free of charge and voluntary to use. Around 40 partners from business, science and public administration will offer their own applications from day one, among them Deutsche Post, Vodafone, Rossmann, the retail association HDE, banks and banking associations, the federal employment and pension agencies, universities and municipalities.

The three use cases named for launch are age verification, legally binding contract signature and bank account opening; credentials stay encrypted on the user's device with no central database, and the user decides which attributes to release to whom. IT Finanzmagazin reported the next day that neither the technical specification for attaching d-you to existing KYC processes, nor the eIDAS 2.0 trust-service requirements, nor the format of the wallet attestations have been published, so bank and PSP integration teams have no API contract with under four months to go.

eIDAS 2.0 obliges every member state to offer a wallet, and Germany is the largest acceptance market to put a date and a partner list against that obligation. For payments the wallet is an authentication and onboarding rail rather than a payment method: account opening is a named launch use case, which puts a state-issued credential directly into PSP and acquirer KYC flows, and age verification with HDE and Rossmann on board is the first mass-retail checkout use case a German counter will meet.

The missing interface specification is the substantive part of the story - the launch date is fixed, the integration contract for the institutions that have to consume the wallet is not, which is how a mandated identity rail arrives without the payment industry being able to build against it.

Whether BMDS publishes the KYC integration and eIDAS 2.0 trust-service specifications before the January launch, which of the roughly 40 launch partners actually ship a payment or onboarding use case, and whether the age-verification flow reaches physical checkouts through HDE members rather than staying online.

• bmds.bund.de
• retail-news.de on the launch partners, 9 Sep 2026
• IT Finanzmagazin on the missing bank interface specs, 10 Sep 2026