A consortium of six European nations is pushing for a new, digital, cross-border payment system which ultimately aims to combine the EU Digital Identification program with a digital euro.
The NOBID (Nordic-Baltic eID) project – which is comprised of the governments of Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Latvia and Norway – is being supported by multinational banks, large technology firms, and other government agencies from across Europe.
NOBID’s website describes the project – which sounds eerily similar the kinds of social credit system used by countries like Communist China – as the brainchild of the unelected European Commission.
“The payment use case is recognized as a key use case based on several rationales, one being the potential extension to the Digital Euro,” they claim. In its current stage, the project will likely link national bank accounts to the centralized application, and will act as intermediary between banks and merchants.
Since the Digital Euro has not yet been deployed and is slowly looking to enable its application in a peer-to-peer framework, and such projects can drastically help to advance final implementation. A prototype phase for the ECB issued Digital Euro currency might be utilized by the end of 2023.
Tor Alvik, project manager of the consortium said, “We are hugely excited to turn the EU vision into a reality and make smoother, more readily available ID services possible for all,” effectively confirming the link between both the EU DigitalID System and the Digital Euro.
The European Digital Identity, in development since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, integrates various aspects of personal identifiers including birth certificates, medical documents, bank accounts, tax returns, education status, and prescriptions. As The National Pulse has previously reported, the goal for the EUiD is to act as the central authority for identification for both physical and digital world.
Various consortiums and companies across Europe are already developing numerous projects as a second layer to the EU Digital ID system and expanding its capabilities. One company for example, iProov, is focused on biometric authentication systems which patented important biometric ID tools used by various governments and corporates. The company specializes in deepfake threat detection, passwordless authentication, facial recognition, vaccine status verification, and more. iProov is also part of the NOBID consortium.
With more services integrated on top of the EUiD, concerns are growing about threats to privacy and individual liberty. Given the developments that took place during COVID, people across Europe have experienced major violations of their personal freedoms – which were dictated by technocratic leadership on both national and supranational levels.
