At a glance
- Sector: Government — cross-border digital trust & data exchange
- Our role: Technical and methodological partner — trust-services recognition, regional data exchange and national eID — alongside Estonian partners the e-Governance Academy and ESTDEV
- Programme: For the Western Balkans Six, through the Regional Cooperation Council and CEFTA, on the eIDAS model
Challenge
A digital signature is only useful where it is trusted. Inside one country that is solvable. Across borders it is a wall: a contract qualified in one state is just a PDF in the next, and people and businesses fall back to paper the moment they cross a frontier.
The European Union solved this with eIDAS — a common legal and technical framework under which a qualified signature is recognised everywhere. The Western Balkans wanted the same, for trust and for the data behind it: six economies, each with its own laws, supervisory bodies and pace, that together could let digital trust — and the records that depend on it — travel across the region and, in time, into the EU's single market. That is not a system you install. It is law, institutions, standards and politics, aligned across six governments at once.
Approach
RaulWalter has been a technical and methodological partner in the region for years — alongside Estonian partners the e-Governance Academy and ESTDEV, through the Regional Cooperation Council and later CEFTA. Across the programme we have:
- helped put eIDAS-aligned legislation in place across the six and authored the regional mutual-recognition guidelines — the legal, supervisory and Trust-List frameworks that recognition will run on (eIDAS Article 14 / the ETSI four pillars);
- defined the path to EU recognition under Article 14 — the same route the EU opened to Ukraine and Moldova — with a four-phase methodology, a regional pilot and pooled conformity-assessment capacity;
- designed the regional data-exchange architecture beneath it — the trust models and use cases for institutions to share data securely, not just signatures;
- provided hands-on technical assistance to individual economies, including eID and data-exchange work for Kosovo and North Macedonia.
Recognition is bilateral by design — each economy with the EU, and with each other — so our role is the one no single country can play: the regional coordinator that keeps six self-assessments aligned, the methodology consistent, and the political timing synchronised, so the Parties reach the European Commission together rather than one at a time.
Expected outcome
The hard part of cross-border digital trust is not the technology — it is the legal, institutional and political alignment beneath it, across six governments at once. That groundwork is what the programme has built so far: eIDAS-aligned legislation now in place across the six economies, a regional mutual-recognition framework and methodology, and a defined, CEFTA-mandated path to EU recognition under Article 14. On that foundation, the expected outcome is:
- mutual recognition of trust services across the six — a signature qualified in one economy honoured in the others;
- national Trust Lists, integrated and extended into the EU's single market under Article 14;
- secure data exchange between institutions — within each economy and across the region;
- one regional methodology that lets the six advance together, not one at a time.