Seamless Trust,
Borderless Trade

Empowering businesses

What is the Company Passport?

Company Passport offers a Trust Framework (TF) that leverages eIDAS to enable secure and seamless trade with other businesses, consumers, and interactions with public entities. Company Passport achieves this through the following elements:

Joint Taxonomy & Schemes

A key responsibility of the TF is bringing together and harmonizing the taxonomies and schemes of various Issuers, to facilitate interoperability and consistent application across different sectors and regions. While it will align with existing Dutch and European legal frameworks, the TF will ensure that the taxonomy evolves to meet the specific needs of the initiative and remains relevant as new use cases and scenarios emerge.

Cross-Branch Governance

The TF will be established on a solid governance structure, ensuring that its activities are conducted in a sustainable, risk-aware, and high-quality manner, while considering the perspectives of participating partners as well as applicable laws and regulations.

Interoperable Technical Architecture

Although Company Passport is not intended to develop technical solutions, the TF will design the necessary architecture and technical specifications to ensure compliance with legal standards and maximize interoperability, including cross-border. This architecture will be rooted in existing regulations and standards such as eIDAS 2.0 and the EUDI Wallet ARF (Architecture and Reference Framework).

Self-supporting funding Model

The Company Passport initiative is not commercially driven. However, the TF and its activities require funding. To address this, a funding model must be developed and maintained, with financial flows properly accounted for.

Legal Framework

The TF is responsible for ensuring that partners can operate within a clear legal framework and that any changes in (international) law and regulation are communicated in a timely manner, leading to necessary adaptations.

Communication & Adoption Strategy

Company Passport is a new concept based on innovative technological solutions. Therefore, effective communication about the initiative is crucial for attracting interest and promoting adoption. The adoption of the digital process for entrepreneurs could benefit from a “step-by-step” Process Guidance Application. Although ideally offered by a relevant market player, the TF may provide a reference app for this purpose.

The goal of the Company Passport is to simplify the process of founding a company and trade with other organisations while guaranteeing (legal) certainty by further digitizing the processes, making use of Self Sovereign Identity and trust services embedded in eIDAS.

Added value for companies

The value of the Company Passport for companies is significant and can be roughly divided into 4 categories: higher efficiency, improved customer journey, reduced risks, and a positive social impact.

More efficiency

Business data sharing still largely occurs through mail and email. In some industries, the fax has been eliminated, but these methods of sharing data still poses information security and privacy risks. Therefore, companies often fall back to inefficient paper-based processes if security is an issue. The Company Passport can significantly reduce, if not completely eliminate, the need for paper-based transactions. By digitizing and unlocking data in a wallet in one place, various processes, both public (such as taxes) and private (such as creating a debtor and assigning trade credit), can be performed more efficiently.

Reduced Costs

Utilizing the Company Passport will help a company in daily operations with other organisations and will result in cost savings. Companies currently submit costly and time-consuming paper documents to receive services, which the receiving party must manually process and enter into their system. Attestations automate the verification and data entry process, resulting in less administration as well as cost savings from automatic compliance checks and reduced manual processing.

Reduced Risks

In 2021, the fraud help desk received 73 reports of bogus invoices and 402 reports of identity fraud involving legal entities. The actual number of bogus invoices is unknown as most cases probably go unnoticed. In addition, cases have been registered involving acquisition fraud (729 reports), CEO fraud (288 reports), domain name fraud (153 reports), phishing (246 reports), and fake emails (153 reports). The Company Passport makes it easier to access data about a business, the person acting on behalf of the business, and other data such as the financial health of a business. This makes it possible to engage in transactions with greater (legal and financial) certainty.

Social Impact

By digitizing processes or digitally supporting them through data transparency about processes, such as which data is used for what, the status of an application, and which data is returned.