João Rei on digital identity, building trust across borders, and the messy middle of it all

I think that from quite a young age, I always had the desire to travel and live abroad. It was never really about feeling that Portugal had too little to offer. On the contrary, it gave me a lot. But I was driven by curiosity and ambition, by this need to see the world for myself and understand how life worked beyond the borders of the country I grew up in.

If I could sit down with that younger version of myself today, I think I would tell him that, in an important way, we made it. Maybe Tallinn, Estonia is not the first city that comes to mind when you are young and imagining the wider world. It is not New York or London. But that was never really the point. The point was to leave, to explore, to build a life beyond what was familiar, and to learn from it. And in that sense, Estonia became much more than a destination. It became home, and the starting point for so many of the things that would come later.

Looking back, moving there in 2004 was one of those decisions that seems bigger with time. At first, it was simply a step into the unknown. But over the years, it became clear that it was also a step into the right environment, a place that was open, forward-looking, and willing to rethink how society and technology could work together. So if I had to answer that younger version of myself honestly, I would say: yes, we saw the world. And in the process, we found our place in it.

2015 feels like a lifetime ago. Back then, we were building things mostly for the joy of it, and I was a big believer in hackathons as places where ideas could move very quickly from thought to reality.

At that particular hackathon, organized by the Estonian e-Residency team with Garage48, we were a small group working on a simple idea: make it incredibly easy for websites to let users identify themselves with an Estonian ID card or e-Residency card. The ambition was almost deceptively simple, just one line of code, in the same spirit as a social login.

By the end of the first night, we had the basics working. On the second day, we started showing it to the other teams, and to my surprise, some of them actually began using it during the hackathon itself. At the time, it felt exciting, but not yet historic. I certainly did not think, "this is the beginning of a company."

What gave it significance over time was the shift in the world around us. Back then, state-backed digital identity was still a niche concept, strongest in Estonia and a few Nordic countries. It was really around the pandemic that the need became undeniable. Suddenly, governments, businesses, and institutions everywhere were under pressure to digitize physical processes, from proving identity to signing documents remotely. That was the moment when we realized this was not just a clever hackathon project. It was part of a much larger transformation.

For a long time, people associated e-signatures with little more than convenience: upload a PDF, draw something that looks like a signature, and move on. But real trust requires much more than that.

We have had a saying at eID Easy for years: Businesses may be global, but trust is local. I still believe that is the core principle. A well-built e-signature solution earns trust not only through good technology, but by connecting to trust frameworks that people, businesses, and institutions already recognize.

That means identity must be verifiable, the audit trail must be reliable, and the legal basis must be clear. But beyond compliance, there is also a human layer: people need to feel confident that the signature is tied to a real identity and backed by institutions they already trust. In practice, that means plugging into existing networks of trust service providers that have real relationships on the ground. Technology enables trust, but it is that local trust layer that makes adoption possible.

That is exactly the heart of the problem we are solving. At this stage, cross-border compliance is no longer primarily a technology problem. The technology is, in many ways, the easier part. We have standards, interoperability models, and mature ways to connect systems.

The harder challenge is alignment between legal frameworks, trust models, and institutional acceptance. A signature may be technically sound, but if it is not recognized within the legal and trust framework of another country, that is where friction begins.

Europe has been an especially important proving ground because eIDAS 1.0 created a shared legal foundation for the recognition of qualified signatures across EU member states. That gave the market something very powerful: predictability. And now we are seeing similar momentum elsewhere, with more countries entering cross-border arrangements and recognition discussions. That is where the real future lies, not just in interoperability of systems, but in interoperability of trust.

The promise of eIDAS 2.0 is that it addresses some of the limitations of the first version, especially around uneven adoption across Europe. This is not a small regulatory update. It is a transformational moment for the European identity landscape.

When this begins to show up in everyday life, I think the difference people will feel is simplicity. Identity and signing should become more natural, more portable, and more consistent across borders. Users should have more control, but they should also experience less friction.

For organizations, the priority now is to prepare for that shift without overcomplicating it. They should start by understanding where identity sits inside their current customer journeys, onboarding flows, and signing processes. Then they should look at how to make those workflows wallet-ready in a way that is modular, not disruptive.

That is exactly where eID Easy can help. Our role is to make sure clients can connect to new trust mechanisms, including the European Digital Identity Wallets, without having to rebuild everything from scratch. As these wallets come to market, our goal is to make them accessible through the infrastructure our clients are already using.

I am an optimist, and I believe in global collaboration. So if I look 10 years ahead, I hope we will be living in a world with fewer regional nuances and much broader global acceptance of trusted local providers.

That said, I do not think local trust disappears. In fact, I think it remains essential. Trust is always rooted somewhere, in institutions, in legal frameworks, in cultural expectations, in systems people already know. What I hope changes is not the local foundation, but the level of global recognition built on top of it.

So the future, in my view, is not one single universal trust provider. It is a global framework of acceptance, where local trust anchors remain strong, but can be understood and relied upon across borders much more easily than they are today.

eID Easy's role in the ecosystem has always been the same: to be a connector. The Meetup Series is really a natural extension of that role, just moved into a physical space.

What we want from these gatherings is not just networking. We want to create room for honest conversations between people who are shaping this space from different angles, clients, partners, regulators, builders, and thought leaders. The digital trust ecosystem is still evolving, and many of the challenges we face are shared. Product alone cannot solve that. Conversation matters too.

For us, these events are valuable because they create a different kind of signal. You hear what people are worried about, what they are hopeful about, and where the market is heading before that becomes visible in product requirements or policy papers. And just as importantly, they allow for more relaxed and human conversations with the people we work with.

And yes, absolutely, we would love to bring the series to India. That would be a very exciting one to put on the calendar.

This is absolutely critical if we want these tools to move beyond relatively narrow digital-first niches and become part of everyday life for everyone.

Governments carry a dual responsibility here. First, as issuers of identity, they have to ensure that access is fair, secure, and inclusive. Second, they have to communicate clearly what digital identity is, how it works, and where its boundaries are.

That communication piece is often underestimated. If governments use the wrong language, especially around identity, surveillance, or control, mistrust grows very quickly. And once mistrust sets in, adoption becomes much harder, no matter how good the technology is.

So inclusion is not only about infrastructure or usability. It is also about language, framing, and public confidence. If we want people to step into digital identity systems fairly, we have to design those systems around trust and clarity, rather than expecting people to simply catch up.

I spoke about the messy middle in the context of building a company, but I think it applies much more broadly. It is that space between the early excitement of an idea and the moment when success or failure becomes obvious. It is where nothing is certain, except that you still have to keep going.

What that phase teaches you is which battles are actually worth fighting. Not every difficulty deserves persistence. But if you are building something you truly believe in, the messy middle is where conviction gets tested and, in many cases, where it gets strengthened.

For people living in that in-between space now, I would say this: belief matters. I would not call it delusion. I would call it commitment. When you are building something meaningful, you need a degree of belief that goes beyond what is immediately rational, because otherwise the hard days will stop you.

Life comes with challenges either way. So if you are fortunate enough to choose your own challenge, and to pursue something that genuinely matters to you, that is already a kind of privilege. In many ways, that is the blessing.