Lissi: EUDI Wallet software from Frankfurt am Main
Lissi GmbH calls itself "a leading German software company that builds the critical infrastructure for organizations to interact with the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI Wallet)". In plain terms: a bank, an insurer or a public body that has to issue or check wallet credentials buys the software for that step from a company like Lissi instead of building the protocol stack.
The company sits at Gervinusstraße 17 in Frankfurt am Main. That matters for anyone in German finance planning wallet work, because the identity infrastructure European banks will have to accept is being written in the same city where the banks are.
What Lissi sells
Four products, by the company's own names. The Lissi Connector, which it also calls the EUDI Wallet Connector, is described as API software for eIDAS 2 compliance: it is the piece that lets an organization's existing systems request and check credentials from a certified wallet. The Lissi Wallet is the company's EUDI Wallet prototype, which it describes as proven and tested. The EUDI Wallet Starter is the entry route, with a test environment and a production option. The Employee Wallet Suite applies the same mechanics inside a company, for the employee lifecycle.
The split is the one that runs through this whole field. A connector serves the organization that verifies or issues; a wallet serves the person who holds. A buyer who only needs to accept credentials at onboarding needs the first, and decentralized identity in Europe sets out the three roles and the other European companies in the field.
What the connector does for a bank
At onboarding the bank is the verifier. The connector ends the exchange with the customer's wallet, asks for the attributes the process needs, checks the signature and whether the issuer is on the trust list, and passes a result to the onboarding system in a form it already handles. The bank does not have to follow each member state's wallet release itself, which is the whole point of buying a connector.
What a wallet presentation delivers is the identification step of customer due diligence, and not the rest of it. Purpose of the relationship, beneficial ownership, source of funds, sanctions and PEP screening and ongoing monitoring stay the bank's own duties, as KYC in Germany and AML in Germany set out. A bank also stays the issuer in its own processes, for instance when it attests an account relationship or an employee's authority.
The pilots and the German wallet competition
Lissi names the European pilots it works in, EWC and POTENTIAL, both of them large-scale pilots funded by European Commission grants, and it names IDunion as a partner. The EUDI Wallet explains what the four pilots test.
In Germany the company took part in SPRIND Funke EUDI Wallet Prototypes, the prototype challenge the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation ran over 15 months in three stages to develop and test technical solutions for future German EUDI wallets. SPRIND's own account of the completed challenge on sprind.org reports four remaining teams presenting their prototypes at the closing conference and declares no single winner, and it lists the Lissi wallet in the non-funded track. Some later coverage calls Lissi the winner of the federal challenge; the award's own publication does not, and the careful statement is that Lissi was in the challenge through to its final stage.
Who stands behind the company
Lissi's investors include main incubator, the Commerzbank Group company, and BMH Beteiligungs-Managementgesellschaft Hessen, the holding company of the State of Hesse, alongside Ventech and Ninepointfive Ventures, per the funding announcement by Ventech. The same announcement describes the plan behind the money: a software development kit with which a financial company can put identity wallet functions directly into its own app, so that, in co-founder Sebastian Bickerle's words, "any banking app can be expanded into an ID wallet in no time at all".
A bank incubator and a state holding company in the shareholder list says something about where the demand is expected to come from. Banks are among the relying parties that European law obliges to accept the wallet, and a bank that wants the wallet inside its own app, as a feature of the banking app itself, needs exactly the kit described above.
Where Lissi sits beside the rest of the field
By what the products do. Lissi builds the connector and a wallet prototype for the regulated sectors, with banking named first. walt.id sells issuer, wallet and verifier as separate SDKs with an open-source edition. Procivis AG in Zurich builds modular open-source identity technology and a government platform. Scytáles AB in Sweden works the mobile document standards, ISO 18013-5 and ICAO 9303. esatus AG comes from enterprise identity and access management. IDnow GmbH in Munich sells a full identification service in which a wallet is one method.
Which of these fits depends on the role the buyer plays and on whether the wallet exchange or the finished identification is what is wanted. Decentralized identity in Europe describes each company in its own words.
What is Lissi?
Lissi GmbH is a software company in Frankfurt am Main that builds the infrastructure organizations use to interact with the European Digital Identity Wallet. Its main product is the Lissi Connector, API software for eIDAS 2 compliance, and it also offers the Lissi Wallet, an EUDI Wallet prototype, plus an EUDI Wallet Starter and an Employee Wallet Suite.
What is the Lissi Wallet?
The Lissi Wallet is the company's own EUDI Wallet prototype, which it describes as proven and tested, and which it entered in the German SPRIND Funke EUDI Wallet Prototypes challenge. A wallet of this kind holds the holder's credentials on their own device and presents them on request. The state wallet German residents will use is a separate app from Bund, Länder und Kommunen, described on the EUDI Wallet.
What does the Lissi Connector do?
The Lissi Connector connects an organization's existing systems to the EUDI Wallet protocols, so the organization can request, issue and verify credentials against certified wallets without building the protocol stack itself. The company describes it as API software for eIDAS 2 compliance and also calls it the EUDI Wallet Connector.
Lissi and Finance Loop
Finance Loop is the meeting place in Frankfurt for the banks and software firms that have to make the European identity wallet work in production, and Lissi builds that software in the same city. Finance Loop runs events in Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich and Hamburg where compliance, onboarding and identity architects from banks and payment institutions meet the companies supplying them. Identity infrastructure belongs to Finance Loop's Risk & Compliance and Digital Infrastructure & Sovereignty tracks.
Finance Loop is a professional network and has the goal of driving the adoption of emerging technologies in finance, such as AI, tokenization, stablecoins, and DeFi. Finance Loop helps its members build skills and personal networks in these fields: Investment & Digital Assets, Payments & Digital Money, Digital Infrastructure & Sovereignty, and Risk & Compliance.