How Luxembourg enables widespread use of e-services in the private and public sectors

All people living and working in Luxembourg can get electronic identities (eIDs) issued by the national trust services provider LuxTrust. The national LuxTrust eID enables widespread use of e-services in the private and public sectors in Luxembourg in a unified country-wide manner. “People can get one private eID and one employee eID, which are stored centrally and accessed via mobile apps, smart cards or hard tokens,” says Pascal Rogiest, CEO of LuxTrust.

Examples of organizations offering e-services to the public are government agencies, e-commerce sites, retail banks and life insurance companies.

“Many organizations also want to protect their internal applications and enable their employees to make legally binding digital signatures. In the professional eID, information about the company is also included, which makes it possible for an employee to sign contracts with external parties as well as internal documents,” says Rogiest.

To get an eID, people living and working in Luxembourg visits either LuxTrust or one of Luxembourg’s retail banks.

“Face-to-face identification and verification of physical ID documents are done, as well some money laundering prohibiting procedures. The issued eID can then be used for all e-services in Luxembourg,” says Rogiest.

LuxTrust was created 12 years ago on the initiative of the government in Luxembourg, and is now co-owned by the government and a number of retail banks.

“Today, we manage more than 500,000 eIDs, which are used for 100,000–300,000 transactions every day,” says Rogiest.

LuxTrust is certified according to the EU regulation eIDAS, which is a set of standards for electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the European Single Market. At the heart of LuxTrust is a certificate authority (CA) software, that issues and manages the certificates needed to make the eIDs trustworthy.

“We have recently changed CA softwares, and are now using identity and security company Nexus Group’s CA software Certificate Manager. This new CA software will, among other things, make it possible for us to expand internationally,” says Rogiest.

Read press release LuxTrust opts for Nexus’s solution to issue eIDs to everybody in Luxembourg