In March 2026, Intrepid Fox was selected for the Startup Programme at the Merchant Payments Ecosystem (MPE) conference in Berlin. As part of it, our founder Roman ZIlber joined a panel on Digital Identity. 

The EU Digital Identity (EUDI) wallet promises instant business verification. A company presents its credentials, the verifier uses them to retrieve online data from official registers, performs the neded checks - onboarding is done. This is the vision.

In practice, roughly 50% of European companies cannot be verified instantly through official registers. Many registries do not provide complete and critical information on the company officers and shareholders onlineor structured in ways that make automated retrieval unreliable. Until the underlying data infrastructure catches up to the wallet layer, "real-time" remains partial at best.

So, verifying a corporate structure, its directors, its UBOs, and the supporting documents still involves rounds of back-and-forth between compliance teams and applicants. A customer uploads the wrong document. The analyst reviews it hours later. The customer responds the next day with another imperfect submission. The cycle repeats.

At the companies we work with, this back-and-forth consumes 30 to 50% of an onboarding analyst's working time. Compliance operations can account for up to 10% of fintech headcount, with onboarding costs reaching hundreds of euros per case. Around 30% of applications are lost during the process. That is revenue that never arrives.

The EUDI Business wallet will help when it matures. But it requires registry harmonisation across member states, credential issuance infrastructure for businesses, and adoption by both issuers and verifiers. None of that is trivial, and compliance teams cannot wait years before that all is resolved.

At Intrepid Fox, we address the problem where it breaks today: when a customer submits data during onboarding, the system checks it in real time. Wrong document type, missing pages, expired validity, mismatched entity names. The customer gets feedback immediately and corrects the issue while still in the flow. The cycle that used to take weeks compresses to hours or a single session.

The EUDI framework is the right direction. A standardised identity layer for European businesses would reduce friction, lower costs, and make cross-border commerce faster. But the gap between that vision and operational reality is still large.

That gap is exactly where the opportunity is. Turning business verification into an intelligent, real-time process does not require waiting for the wallet. It requires rethinking how documents and data are handled at the operational level, using AI capabilities that exist today.

Intrepid Fox is an AI-native KYB platform that helps payment companies, banks, and fintechs onboard business customers faster.