Relying parties and organisational mandates

If you rely on these instruments, the law pulls in two directions at once: acceptance duties (you may not demand apostilles, and you must accept the instruments as evidence) and diligence duties (authentication and validation are your job, and narrow fraud and authenticity safeguards exist for the doubtful case). Getting either direction wrong is expensive.

Who this page is for

Registers, notaries and public authorities receiving cross-border instruments; private-sector verifiers of company authority; and operators of services that will consume wallet presentations.

What you must accept

• The EU Company Certificate — in all Member States, as sufficient evidence at the time of issuance of incorporation and its listed contents [Directive (EU) 2025/25, Art. 16b(1)].
• The digital EU power of attorney — as evidence of the authorised person's entitlement to represent the company "as specified in the document" [Directive (EU) 2025/25, Art. 16c(2)].
• Without legalisation. Both instruments, and register-certified copies and pre-operation certificates, are exempt from all forms of legalisation and any similar formality [Directive (EU) 2025/25, Art. 16d(2)]. Demanding an apostille on an in-scope instrument after the application date is not caution; it is non-compliance with the transposed rules.
• With restraint on translations. Member States must endeavour not to require translations where the information is available in the certificate or through the interconnection system, and may require certified translations only where justified and strictly necessary [Directive (EU) 2025/25, Art. 16g(1)–(2)].

What you must do

• Authenticate and validate. On the wallet side, the rule is explicit: "Relying parties shall be responsible for carrying out the procedure for authenticating and validating person identification data and electronic attestation of attributes requested from European Digital Identity Wallets" [Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 (eIDAS 2), Art. 5b(9) of Reg. 910/2014 as inserted]. Acceptance duties do not outsource verification to the presenter.
• Read the scope. The power of attorney is evidence only of what is "specified in the document" [Directive (EU) 2025/25, Art. 16c(2)]. The template's mandatory fields — scope, person, type of representation [Directive (EU) 2025/25, Art. 16c(4)] — are there for you to check, not to skip. See valid token ≠ allowed action.
• Register before relying on wallets. A relying party intending to rely on wallet presentations must register in its Member State of establishment, declare its intended use and the data it will request — and may not request more than it declared [Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 (eIDAS 2), Art. 5b(1)–(3)]. The machinery — national registers, a common API, access certificates — is set out in Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/848, which applies from 24 December 2026 [Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/848, Arts. 3–8 and 11]. Details: Relying-party registration.

What you may do — narrowly

• Query authenticity in cases of reasonable doubt. For register-issued documents and the EU Company Certificate, a contact-point procedure exists: reasoned request, reply within 5 working days, refusal only if the issuing register does not confirm, notification to the presenter within 10 working days [Directive (EU) 2025/25, Art. 16e(1)–(4)].
• Refuse for suspected abuse or fraud — exceptionally. Case by case, on reasonable grounds, where justified by public interest, after consulting the register that provided the document or information [Directive (EU) 2025/25, Art. 16f(1)–(2)]. The recitals warn this must not become systematic rejection, and that differences between national preventive-control traditions are not grounds for refusal [Directive (EU) 2025/25, recital 26].

What the law does not give you

A guaranteed, Union-wide, real-time answer to "is this power of attorney still in force right now?". Filing of revocations with a register is a Member State option, not a duty [Directive (EU) 2025/25, Art. 16c(3)]; how revocation status will surface in wallet presentations awaits the implementing act. Until the rails exist, your reliance procedures — not the instruments — carry that risk. Our analysis: Revocation.

Timeline for relying parties