Supplier verification today means re-collecting the same documents from the same supplier over and over. eIDAS 2.0 points to a different model: identity the supplier holds and proves.
Supplier verification today is repetitive and wasteful. Every buyer asks the same supplier for the same documents, checks them once, and stores a copy that starts ageing immediately. eIDAS 2.0, the European Union's revised regulation on electronic identification and trust services, points to a very different model, and it will reshape how businesses prove who they are over the next few years.
The headline change is the European Digital Identity Wallet. Under eIDAS 2.0, EU member states are introducing wallets that let people and organisations hold verified credentials and present them on demand. For businesses, that includes verifiable proof of legal entity, registration, and attributes such as authorised signatories, issued as qualified electronic attestations that a relying party can trust without re-checking from scratch.
Why this matters for supplier verification
Today's model collects identity at the buyer's edge: each company runs its own checks and holds its own copy. eIDAS 2.0 inverts that. The supplier holds verified credentials and presents them, and the buyer verifies the cryptographic proof rather than the paperwork. The difference is the same one that separates a connected network from a stack of isolated portals. Instead of verifying a supplier from zero, you confirm a credential that a trusted authority has already attested.
For accounts payable, the practical gains are real. Onboarding gets faster because the supplier presents proof rather than assembling documents. Confidence rises because the credential is cryptographically verifiable and harder to forge than a PDF of a utility bill. And the data stays current, because credentials can be revoked or updated at source rather than rotting in a vendor master.
Where UK businesses fit
The UK is outside the EU's eIDAS regime, so the European Digital Identity Wallet will not be a UK scheme. But UK businesses are not insulated. Any company trading with EU suppliers or customers will increasingly encounter counterparties who can present wallet-based credentials, and will need systems that can accept and verify them. The UK is also developing its own approach to trusted digital identity through its digital identity and attributes trust framework, aimed at a similar outcome by a different route. The likely end state is interoperability rather than a single scheme, which means UK finance teams should design for verifiable credentials in general, not for one country's wallet.
The portable identity principle
Strip away the regulation and the underlying idea is simple: a supplier should be verified once and that verification should travel. This is the supplier identity principle that a connected accounts payable network already applies. When a supplier is verified on the network, every buyer it works with inherits that assurance, and changes to the supplier's details or ownership propagate rather than being re-discovered one buyer at a time. eIDAS 2.0 is the regulatory weather moving in the same direction the network was already built for.
What to do now
Two things. First, stop treating verification as a one-off capture. Build towards continuous, source-linked verification so that a supplier's status reflects reality, not the day you onboarded them. Second, prefer infrastructure that can consume verifiable credentials as they arrive, rather than locking your process to scanned documents. A network that already holds verified supplier identity and live payment behaviour data is the natural place for wallet-issued credentials to land. See how verified supplier identity works across the network. Where eIDAS or UK identity rules might bear on your obligations, take specialist advice; this is an overview, not legal guidance.
