A bank-issued data wallet and a personal data pod are different bets
Theirs is a bet that the valuable thing is where the data came from. Ours is a bet that the valuable thing is who controls it. Today theirs is winning, and the reason is not engineering. Nothing here is legal advice.
What they built
A personal vault that pulls verified attributes from authoritative national sources, the tax authority, the population register, the employee-insurance agency, a pension overview, and banks, and lets a person present them where they are needed: renting a home, applying for a mortgage.
For an income check that means an annual figure from the tax authority and twelve months of employment detail from the insurance agency, not a payslip photograph, not a self-declaration.
And a correction to our own note: we recorded it as bank-backed. It originated inside a bank and was spun out as an independent entity to reach beyond that bank's customers.
Why that is the strong half of this comparison
An attribute sourced from the tax authority is true in a way no self-asserted claim can be.
That is the scarcest thing in this entire field, and it cannot be built. It is granted, by institutions, through integrations, under agreements, in one country's legal system at a time. No amount of protocol design substitutes for it, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling architecture as a replacement for trust.
We have none of it. Not one registry integration, anywhere.
What it costs, stated as a cost and not a defeat
It works inside one country's registry system. The tax authority, the population register and the insurance agency exist there. Cross the border and the sources are different, or absent, and the integrations have to be rebuilt.
A protocol-based pod is jurisdiction-agnostic, because it makes no claim about where data came from at all. That is exactly why it travels, and exactly why it is worth less on arrival.
Those are the two ends of one trade, and neither end is free.
Our honest position, which is not the flattering version
The flattering version is "we chose portability over depth." It is not true.
They shipped a product used in real housing and mortgage flows. We hold a design position.
The comparison is between something working and something argued, and stating it any other way would be the kind of sentence this estate exists to prevent.
The part that is genuinely ours to argue, and where it is going
A pod holds whatever you put in it, from any source, including things no registry issues, and you can host it yourself with no dependency on any institution's willingness to integrate with you.
And the direction of European regulation runs toward the registry-backed model, not away from it. That matters more to us than it might look:
- A self-issued identifier is worth nothing until a relying party trusts the issuer. Registry sourcing manufactures that trust; protocol design does not.
- EUDI ARF alignment is a roadmap conformance statement with a Q4 2026 target, not a held certification, and the qualified-trust-service path and mdoc issuance are documented roadmap items. We hold no qualified status and claim none.
- The reason to pursue it is exactly what this page concedes: the trust that makes an attribute useful is granted by institutions, and European rules are the mechanism that grants it at scale.
So the honest reading is that we are trying to get to the half of this comparison we do not have, and are not there.
Choosing, if you are choosing
- Need attributes a landlord or lender will accept, in a country where the registries exist? Theirs, or something like it. Not us.
- Need to hold data no registry issues, or to work across borders where those integrations do not exist? That is the pod model, and you can run it yourself today.
- Need both? Nobody has both yet, and a vendor claiming to should be asked which registries, in which countries, under what agreement.