The Big Comparison: From Flop to Personal Digital Fortress

The E-ID proposal of 2019 was a classic own goal: privatized, centralized, and with privacy on the back burner. The result in March 2021: a resounding 64% No. The Swiss people didn’t want a “private flavour” national digital identity. Rightly so.

Now, with the new BGEID (2025), Switzerland has made a serious course correction. Instead of half-baked privatization, there is now full state authority, privacy-by-design, and open source. The E-ID resides only on the smartphone in the user’s wallet – not in some cloud run by whoever. Age verification? No longer “name + date of birth correlated with a profile,” but simply “over 18.”

Even more exciting: this is no longer just about an E-ID, but about a trust infrastructure. Driver’s licenses, diplomas, tickets – all digital, tamper-proof, in your own wallet. A federal network-of-networks in which municipalities, cantons, universities, companies, or associations can issue their own credentials.

In short: Switzerland is finally translating its political DNA motto “diversity through federalism” into the digital realm. And this was not cooked up in a backroom, but through a participatory process with NGOs, business, academia, and civil society. Democratically legitimized, technically modern, internationally interoperable.

But here’s the real point: the E-ID is only the key – the lock and the doors are built by the ecosystem. A digital identity alone is of little use if it cannot be applied anywhere. Everyday value emerges only when government, business, and society actively use this infrastructure – with credentials we still carry around on paper today: from residence certificates to debt enforcement extracts, from bank guarantees to e-prescriptions and medical reports. Only then does SWIYU become a universal tool for secure, privacy-preserving, and efficient processes.

The ecosystem does more than create convenience – it strengthens trust: less fraud, less bureaucracy, more automation, genuine freedom of choice, and strict data minimization. That’s the difference compared to the old proposal – and compared to global login solutions offered by tech giants. Without an ecosystem, the E-ID remains a key without doors. With a broadly established ecosystem, it becomes a digital public service, open to innovation and anchored in Swiss values.

For those who want to dig deeper: we’ve compared the 2019 proposal and the new 2024 BGEID in detail (to the best of our knowledge). The document shows in black and white why the new E-ID is not a reheated version, but a true paradigm shift – from a private product to a state trust infrastructure.

The bottom line?

• For citizens: more sovereignty, stronger privacy, less “Big Brother” feeling.

• For the economy: legal certainty, less dependency, more innovation.

• For Switzerland: digital infrastructure as a public service – as essential as roads, bridges, water, and electricity.

Resources:

Read/Download our Comparison: BGEID 2021 vs. 2025