EDD
EDD, the European Digital Directory, is the registry the European Commission would set up under Article 10 of its European Business Wallet proposal, acting as the trusted source of information on the organisations that hold a wallet and on the address at which each of them can be reached.
Article 10 of COM(2025) 838 puts the directory in the hands of the Commission, which would establish, operate and maintain it as a web application with two faces: a machine-readable interface exposed through an API for automated system-to-system communication, and a secure web platform for authenticated and authorised users. It is not a public register. The proposal limits access to European Business Wallet owners, their authorised representatives and providers of European Business Wallets, so it answers questions for parties already inside the ecosystem rather than for anyone who happens to visit.
The data comes from the wallet providers rather than from the companies themselves. A provider supplies the Commission with the categories of information set out in an implementing act whenever it provides a wallet, and passes on any modification or revocation without undue delay, and in any event within one working day. Recital 38 is explicit that the directory leans on what business registers already publish, including through BRIS, instead of duplicating it, and that none of this may indirectly oblige an economic operator to keep the entry up to date itself.
Identifiers tie the entries together. Article 9 designates the European Unique Identifier, the EUID governed by Directive (EU) 2017/1132, as the unique identifier for a wallet owner, and has one created under an implementing act where an operator or public sector body has none. On top of that, a provider assigns every owner at least one unique digital address, used both by the wallet's qualified electronic registered delivery service and by the directory itself. That address is what turns the EDD from a list of names into somewhere a counterparty can look up where to send something.
How the directory should be built is a separate question, and the WE BUILD consortium has taken a position on it. Its WP4 architecture decision argues for keeping the EDD to identification alone, resolving an actor to an ISO 6523 compliant identifier, and delegating the next two steps to infrastructure the EU already mandates: BDXL 2.0 to discover which networks and processes a party is reachable through, and an ecosystem service metadata publisher for the endpoint and certificate. Its reasoning is that a directory which also stored capabilities and endpoints would re-implement registries that already exist. That is the consortium's design decision for its own pilot, not something Article 10 settles.
Two caveats are worth carrying. The same analysis flags that the EUID and BRIS do not cover sole traders, the self-employed or public institutions, so interim registration paths have to be defined before those actors can take part. And none of this is law yet: COM(2025) 838 is a proposal working through the ordinary legislative procedure under file 2025/0358(COD), the text can still change, and the technical detail is left to implementing acts. Where the directory processes personal data the GDPR applies, with data minimisation, purpose limitation and data protection by design and by default named in the recitals.
Read the full explanation
This page gives the short definition. Our explainer shows what it means in practice: who is involved, how it works and what changes for your organisation.
The European Business Wallet explainedIs EDD the same as enhanced due diligence?
No, and the two have nothing to do with each other. In anti-money-laundering work EDD is the usual short form of enhanced due diligence, the deeper set of checks a regulated firm runs on a customer it has assessed as higher risk. This page covers the other EDD: the European Digital Directory that Article 10 of the European Business Wallet proposal would create.
If you arrived here looking for the anti-money-laundering sense, the closest term in this glossary is KYB, which covers the business verification checks that enhanced due diligence builds on.
Does the European Digital Directory replace business registers?
No. Recital 38 of the proposal says the directory will rely on the information business registers already make available, including through BRIS, while ensuring that information is not duplicated, so the authoritative record of a company stays with the register that holds it.
The WE BUILD architecture decision draws the same line one layer further out: the directory should not take over the ecosystem registries that hold capability and endpoint data either. What the EDD adds is the link between a legal business identity and an address a counterparty can actually reach.