The offer
On 13 October 2026, ABN AMRO, Achmea, ASN Bank, Deloitte, KPN and Rabobank announced MyCheck, a digital identity wallet they describe as independent and built to comply with the EU's eIDAS 2.0 rules. According to KPN's announcement, the six are "initiators and investors". They offer to implement the wallet together with the government "without it costing the government or users any money". They say it offers a Dutch alternative to services from large international technology companies, and they are in talks with other parties about participating.
The timing is pointed. The state's own NL Wallet is still waiting on national legislation. Euronews reported on 16 September that 24 of 27 member states will miss the 24 December 2026 deadline and that the Netherlands "postponed its rollout to late 2027 after a pilot had only 57 users". Euronews cites no Dutch official for that claim, and we could not confirm it independently. What the government's own site does say is that EUDI Wallets are "expected to become available later than originally anticipated".
The case for the state wallet
The strongest argument for a government-built wallet is accountability. A state wallet answers to parliament, the courts and the data protection authority. It has no commercial interest in the data that flows through it, and it can be designed around data minimisation without a shareholder asking for a business model. The Dutch government's ID wallet page says the wallet must be provided free of charge, and that use is "entirely voluntary". Critics of a bank-led consortium will reasonably ask whether the largest banks and an audit firm should sit at the centre of a system that decides who gets to prove who they are.
That concern deserves a serious answer, but the Dutch framework already supplies one. The same page says: "The Netherlands has deliberately opted for an open approach that allows multiple EUDI Wallets to operate alongside one another." It adds that "other providers may also enter the market with their own certified EUDI wallets in the future". Private wallets were anticipated from the start. The safeguard is certification, not state monopoly: "their wallets must be certified before they can be recognised as EUDI Wallets."
The bottleneck is the missing law
Here is the awkward part. The government says EUDI Wallets can be used only "once the Dutch House of Representatives has adopted the legislation". It also says the implementing legislation "is expected to be submitted for consultation towards the end of 2026". Consultation is an early stage of Dutch lawmaking. A bill still has to be drafted, go through the Council of State, pass the House and the Senate, and be published.
It follows that no wallet, public or private, can be legally recognised in the Netherlands by 24 December. MyCheck is not blocked by the state's choice of its own product. It is blocked by the same missing statute. Offering to carry the cost does not remove that dependency. It does remove one objection, which is that a late launch is a budget problem.
Why the delay matters
The delay is not harmless. Euronews reports that banks face earlier obligations, starting in July 2027, because of anti-money-laundering rules, and that businesses must accept the wallet by 24 December 2027. If the state wallet slips into late 2027 and no alternative is recognised, regulated firms will have to accept a credential that does not exist for them yet. That is a compliance cliff the sector did not create.
There is also an adoption problem. Euronews says Italy leads with almost 8 million monthly users, while the Dutch pilot reportedly had 57. A wallet nobody uses is not a public good, however well designed. Competition among certified providers is the standard way to find out which designs people actually want, and the Dutch approach is the right place to apply it.
What proportionate policy looks like
A pro-innovation reading does not require picking MyCheck over the NL Wallet. It requires three things.
- Neutral certification. The same technical and privacy criteria should apply to the state wallet and to every private one. If the public wallet is exempt from scrutiny the others face, the open approach is only nominal.
- A bill that does not wait for a single provider. Legislation should set the conditions for recognition and not hard-wire one wallet. Drafting it around the NL Wallet alone would turn a temporary delay into structural lock-in.
- Real voluntariness. The government says existing methods such as DigiD remain available and that wallets do not replace them. That commitment matters most if banks later make wallet use the easy path and other routes slower.
There are open questions we cannot answer from public documents. MyCheck's governance, its data-sharing terms and how it would interoperate with the NL Wallet have not been published in the material we could verify. The coalition's claim that it "complies with all European regulations" is its own statement, not a certification result. Readers and regulators should treat it that way until a certifying body says otherwise.
Bottom line
The Dutch debate is framed as state against market. The evidence points elsewhere. The government built a framework that welcomes multiple certified wallets, and the thing missing is the law that makes any of them usable. The most useful response to MyCheck is to speed up that legislation and keep the certification bar equal for everyone, so that the question of which wallet people prefer gets settled by users and not by the calendar.