AMLR – Can a regulation actually foster frictionless finance?

It’s rare to hear the terms “regulatory requirements” and “simple, seamless transactions” in the same sentence. In fact, in the past, AML regulations in particular have led to greater complexity and fragmented solutions across different countries. With the new EU Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (AMLR), this could change starting next year.

The AMLR applies directly from 10 July 2027 in all member states and is intended to move EU financial legislation from fragmented local rules toward a more harmonized, digital-first model for customer due diligence. For banks, fintechs and other regulated providers, this means greater reliance on secure, interoperable and auditable identification methods across borders. The future AML framework points to three main routes: national eIDs, the European Digital Identity (EUDI) wallet and qualified trust services under eIDAS, including qualified electronic signatures.

National eID solutions will remain a core pillar. Government-backed schemes can offer a high level of assurance when recognized under eIDAS, giving customers a trusted way to prove their identity, and provide financial institutions a structured, repeatable verification process.
The European Digital Identity Wallet, or EUDI-wallet, should make verified identity data easier to store and share. For AML onboarding, it could reduce repeated document checks and country-specific processes, especially in cross-border journeys.
Qualified trust services provide legal and technical assurance for digital transactions. QES (qualified electronic signature) is particularly relevant because it is based on a qualified certificate from a qualified trust service provider and carries strong legal status across the EU, supporting both identity verification and transaction integrity.

The business benefit comes at a cost

Banks and other financial companies can indeed benefit from unified identification methods to scale their business internationally without excessively complex compliance obligations. If customers can reuse trusted identity credentials across markets, institutions may be able to reduce duplicate checks, shorten onboarding journeys, improve auditability and create more consistent risk controls across branches, products and jurisdictions. At the same time, this promise of smoother, more reliable identification does not remove the operational challenge. To make these methods work in practice, financial institutions will need to integrate new identity rails into legacy onboarding flows, core banking systems, risk engines, data governance frameworks and customer-facing channels while maintaining existing processes during the transition.

Choose your integration partner

For businesses that have to comply with the AMLR and want to streamline identification processes, working with an integration partner can significantly reduce complexity, risk, and time to market. This is not a simple technical API integration. It involves regulatory compliance, cryptographic trust infrastructure, cross-border interoperability, evolving technical standards, and organizational governance. Building these capabilities entirely in-house would require specialist expertise that sits well beyond what most businesses handle internally.

Digi depend on advanced technical components such as verifiable credentials, public key infrastructure (PKI), qualified certificates, secure key management, selective disclosure, revocation registries, and interoperability specifications. Implementing these components securely requires cryptographic expertise, secure software development practices, and experience integrating with national registries and trust service providers. An integration partner such as Swisscom can provide pre-built, standards-aligned modules that abstract much of this complexity while supporting compliance with regulatory requirements.

Speed and cost efficiency are equally important. Building a compliant electronic identification solution from the ground up requires substantial upfront investment in architecture design, certification preparation, testing, and security audits. Integration partners typically offer managed services, SDKs, APIs, and hosted trust components that accelerate deployment. This allows businesses to focus on adding identification functionalities like national eIDs, EUDI-wallets and QES into existing customer journeys rather than building the underlying identity infrastructure themselves.

Want to learn more about upcoming regulation in Europe’s finance sector?

AMLR is not the only new European regulation that is expected to enter into force in the next year. It comes in the context of PSD3 and PSR. We have compiled an overview of these new regulations in a free whitepaper and have shown how companies can start to prepare Download now.

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AMLR – Can a regulation actually foster frictionless finance?

The business benefit comes at a cost

Choose your integration partner

Want to learn more about upcoming regulation in Europe’s finance sector?

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