There are two ways to judge how well an organisation handles identity and they each lead to different conclusions.
The first way looks at the identity technology organisations deploy. How strong is the authentication method? Does it resist phishing? Which standards does it support? These are all fair questions if you are choosing a single product to add to your app.
The second looks at what the customer experiences. Whether the same proof of who they are can move from onboarding to login to signing. Whether it holds when they switch from your app to your website, or from your bank to your sister insurer. Whether they prove who they are once or are forced to do so over and over again.
A bank can run a top-rated authentication method on one login screen and still fall back to a username and password everywhere else, re-onboard customers who move to another product, and sign loans by email and PDF. On a technology scorecard, it looks advanced. To the customer, it is the same identification effort repeated at every step.
The Identity Maturity Index 2026 measures that second view: whether a single verified identity travels across the journey or gets rebuilt each time.
In April 2026, itsme commissioned NIQ (Nielsen Consumer LLC) to survey 4,000 people across Belgium and the Netherlands, split evenly across banking, insurance, telecom and energy. For each identity moment (e.g., verifying a new customer, logging in, confirming a transaction, signing a contract) respondents told us two things: which method their provider uses today and what they would expect as a customer.
The first answer became the organisation’s identity maturity score. The second became the importance score. The distance between them is the demand that is not being met.
Every sector then lands on one of five stages, from identity rebuilt at every step through to identity verified once and accepted everywhere. If you want the full model, we walked through all five stages in a dedicated explainer.
Here are the main highlights of the report:
Across the eight sector and country pairs, consumer expectation runs ahead of the identity methods providers actually deploy in seven of them. Belgian banking is the only pair where what providers offer matches what customers want.
The rest show a clear gap between what customers expect and what providers deliver. What decides the size of that gap is not the country a provider operates in. It is whether the providers in a market reuse one shared identity, or each build their own.
For instance, Belgian banks are connected to a single reusable identity, so their customers meet the same trusted login everywhere. Dutch banks each built their own, and their gap is wider as a result. The same split explains most of the differences across the other sectors.
Many providers hold off on offering an external identity app because they assume customers will not want to use “another app.” But the data points the other way.
When asked what would stop them from becoming a customer, 64% of respondents named recording a video selfie with their ID card. That is the single biggest barrier in the study, higher than visiting a branch in person. Using an existing identity app stopped only 10%.
And when asked what should be the standard way to confirm a new customer’s identity, consumers named an external identity app first in every sector, in both countries. No one chose the video selfie or the username and password.
With the EU Wallet Regulation, every EU member state will have to make a digital identity wallet available by the end of 2026, giving people a government-backed way to prove who they are. For regulated organisations, that is one more reusable, high-assurance method to accept.
But a wallet does not move you up the maturity curve on its own. It is simply one more method. Reaching the higher stages is about reusing a single verification across everything a customer does with you: onboarding, login, signing, support… So you have a choice: add the wallet as one more login option and stay where you are, or use it to stop verifying the same person again and again.
And this is not a future idea. In Belgium it already runs at national scale. Around 8 million people use itsme to prove who they are to their bank, their insurer, their telecom and energy providers, and the government. One verified identity, reused at each of those moments instead of being rebuilt every time.
itsme launched in the Netherlands in June 2026, so Dutch providers can now build on the same reusable identity.