Joint Statement on Achieving Interoperable Digital ID Wallets and Trust Services at the 6th Western Balkans Digital Summit

The Western Balkan governments welcomed regional experts, ministers, European Union representatives, the World Bank, and the OpenID Foundation, amongst other global experts, to take part in the 6th Western Balkans Digital Summit on October 1st and 2nd. A key accomplishment of the event was the 6 Western Balkan countries agreeing to the Joint Statement on Achieving Western Balkans Six Interoperable Digital ID Wallets and Trust Services.  “By agreeing to implement regionally interoperable digital identity wallets, harmonise trust services, and strengthen regulatory and technical capacities, the Western Balkans Six committed to advancing secure and seamless digital access for citizens and businesses, in line with EU eIDAS 2.0 standards.”

The OpenID Foundation applauds the Joint Statement, and the six Western Balkan nations' intent to prioritize and pursue interoperability with each other, with Europe, and their foresight to align with EU eIDAS 2.0 standards. It is worth noting that the EU eIDAS 2.0 standards, in turn, point to international standards from the OpenID Foundation (including OpenID for Verifiable Presentation 1.0, and OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance 1.0, and the High Assurance Interoperability Profile 1.0, as well as pointing to standards from peer standards bodies such as ETSI, ISO/IEC, FIDO, W3C, the IETF, and the Cloud Signature Consortium among others.  

The OpenID Foundation’s Vice Chair Dima Postnikov took part in the mainstage panel on “Digital Wallets – Advancing Public Sector Services through Secure and Efficient Solutions."  

The panel was moderated by Vasko Kronevski, CEO of Nextsense, and Dima was joined by peer experts Machiel van der Harst, CEO at Tech5, Vojislav Popovic, Senior Expert on Digital Connectivity, RCC, Edna Katadza, SEED+ Project Manager, Central European Free Trade Association (CEFTA), Ruth Puente, Founder and Executive Director, Open Wallet Foundation, Svyatoslav Senyuta, Government Solutions Regional Leader, VISA and Christopher Tullis, Senior Digital Development Specialist, World Bank.

Digital wallets, interoperability, and cybersecurity were key themes present in this panel, as well as in many other presentations and conversations during the Summit. As OIDF Vice Chair Dima Postnikov shared on stage, “Don’t do it alone. By working together, by partnering with the industry, we can deliver digital trust infrastructure that is functionally better and is secure and interoperable.”

As Executive Director, Gail Hodges affirmed, “The OpenID Foundation stands ready to support the Western Balkan countries, and their partners such as the World Bank and the EU, in their efforts to achieve this ambitious but vital regional digital identity wallet program. The Foundation will continue to work not only with the Balkans, but with our standards body peers and non-profit peers to ensure that the Western Balkan policies can be delivered through the underlying standards and conformance tools.” 

This two-way collaboration between countries and standards bodies helps ensure that all countries and their residents and businesses can equally benefit from secure, privacy-preserving, interoperable, and scalable digital identity solutions. In addition to the Foundation's specifications, the Foundation also offers safe spaces for ecosystem experts to convene, such as the Ecosystem Support Community Group. This Community Group is designed for government and ecosystem decision makers to share best practices to inform their ecosystem and implementation design, and evolve their roadmaps over time. 

We are grateful to the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Macedonia and Minister Stefan Andonovski for hosting the summit and for extending the invitation to the OpenID Foundation to participate, and to Goran Vranic and Stela Mocan at the World Bank and Bojana Naumoska from the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Macedonia for bringing the OpenID Foundation into this excellent event.

About the OpenID Foundation

The OpenID Foundation (OIDF) is a global open standards body committed to helping people assert their identity wherever they choose. Founded in 2007, we are a community of technical experts leading the creation of open identity standards that are secure, interoperable, and privacy preserving. The Foundation’s OpenID Connect standard is now used by billions of people across millions of applications. In the last five years, the Financial Grade API has become the standard of choice for Open Banking and Open Data implementations, allowing people to access and share data across entities. Today, the OpenID Foundation’s standards are the connective tissue to enable people to assert their identity and access their data at scale, the scale of the internet, enabling “networks of networks” to interoperate globally. Individuals, companies, governments and non-profits are encouraged to join or participate. Find out more at openid.net.