Bitkom: 54% of Germans Want the EUDI Wallet, Only 18% Have a Working eID — The Activation Gap is the Real Problem

A second Bitkom survey, a different problem

Two weeks after the 13 April 2026 Bitkom survey put 52 % of Germans at "never heard of the EUDI Wallet," Bitkom released a second representative survey on 27 April that asked a different question. Not "do you know about it" but "would you use it, and can you?" The answers reframe the rollout problem.

• 54 % of Germans say they would use the EUDI Wallet.
• 18 % have an activated eID with a working PIN.
• 57 % have never used the online function of their German national ID card.

We covered the 13 April awareness number and its merchant implications in a separate post. The 27 April number is not a refinement of that story — it is the next problem in the sequence. Awareness is a communications gap that closes with marketing budget. Activation is an operational gap that requires the user to physically have a credential that works on the day they reach your checkout. Those two problems live in different parts of the funnel and have different fix windows.

What "activation" means here

Germany has had an electronic ID since 2010. Every German national ID card (Personalausweis) issued since November 2010 includes a contactless chip with the so-called eID online function. Activating that function requires the cardholder to have received the personal identification number (PIN) in the post — typically a few weeks after card issuance — and to have either remembered it, retrieved it, or set a new one through the AusweisApp on a phone or computer. Without that PIN, the card is a normal physical ID with a chip nobody can use.

The 18 % figure is the share of Germans who, today, can authenticate online with their existing eID right now. The 57 % "never used it" figure is the cohort whose PIN is either lost, never collected, never set, or sitting in a desk drawer next to a card whose owner forgot the PIN exists. The remaining roughly 25 % is "have a PIN, used it at least once, may or may not still know it."

The EUDI Wallet, when it launches in Germany on 2 January 2027, builds on top of this base. The wallet is bound to the eID; the activation flow uses the eID to verify the user; the credentials stored in the wallet are derived from eID-issued attributes. A user without an activated eID cannot, on day one of the wallet, fully provision themselves. They have to either: (a) find and enter a forgotten PIN; (b) request a new PIN through the AusweisApp / Online-Ausweis recovery flow and wait for it in the post; or (c) make an in-person Bürgeramt appointment to reset the credential. Any of these takes days to weeks.

That is the activation gap. It is downstream of the awareness gap. It is upstream of the merchant's checkout.

Why this is a worse problem than awareness

Awareness gaps close with one well-targeted communications campaign. Bitkom President Dr. Ralf Wintergerst called for one in the 13 April release. If BMDS, banks, and large retailers run coordinated awareness work through Q4 2026, the "never heard of it" number can plausibly fall from 52 % to 25 % by launch.

Activation gaps do not close with communications. They close with users individually doing one of three logistical things, on their own time, before they reach a checkout that demands the wallet. The mechanics are slow:

• A new-PIN postal request takes roughly two to three weeks in normal conditions and longer if Bürgerämter are backlogged. Berlin Bürgerämter were backlogged for months in 2024–2025 and the picture has not materially improved.
• A Bürgeramt in-person appointment for a PIN reset has waiting times that, in the largest cities, can exceed a month.
• Setting a new PIN via the AusweisApp requires the user already to have a transport PIN from when the card was issued, which most users in the 57 % cohort cannot find.

Compounding this: the population most likely to want the wallet (54 % "would use it") and the population most likely to have an activated eID (18 %) are almost certainly not the same people. Bitkom's release notes the demographic skew without breaking it out in the headline, but on every prior digital-identity survey in Germany the activated-eID cohort skewed older, more male, more public-sector-employed, and more urban, while the EUDI Wallet enthusiast cohort skews younger and more digital-native. The demand and the working-credential supply are misaligned.

For a merchant, this is not a marketing observation. It is the most important piece of segmentation information available in the public record this quarter.

What changes in the merchant playbook

In our 13 April merchant playbook we recommended a four-step bridge for the awareness gap: plain-language checkout copy, fallback flows for users without a wallet, FAQ and support training, and merchant-driven pre-warming. Each of those steps still applies. The 27 April data adds a fifth step that sits ahead of the others on the timeline.

Step 0 — Pre-warm activation, not just awareness

If your customer base is German and your wallet-based verification is going live in Q1 or Q2 2027, the highest-leverage email you will send between now and launch is not "the EUDI Wallet is coming" — it is "make sure your eID PIN works before January." That email lands months before the wallet exists. It points users to:

• The Online-Ausweis portal for the PIN reset flow.
• The AusweisApp installation page (now also iOS).
• The Bürgeramt online appointment booking systems for in-person resets where required.

The pitch is not about the wallet at all. It is "the same PIN that activates your wallet next year already activates online services today — banks, tax filings, public services. If you cannot remember it, request a new one this month, not in January."

Send it twice: once in October 2026 to your active customer base, once in late November to anyone who did not click. The send is cheap; the conversion compound is that every customer who sets up their PIN before January 2027 is a customer who can complete a wallet onboarding flow without falling off your funnel.

Refresh the four-step playbook against activation, not awareness

The four steps we published in April still hold, with one change of emphasis on each.

• Checkout copy. Add a one-line clarification: "If you have an activated Online-Ausweis (eID with PIN), you can set up the wallet now. If not, [link to PIN reset]." Most German checkouts that integrate the wallet in 2027 will need to handle a user who clicks "verify with EUDI Wallet" and then realises they cannot complete the flow because their PIN is lost. Either a graceful in-flow handoff or an explicit fallback path is not optional.
• Fallback flow. Add an explicit "no working eID, no wallet" path. The realistic 2027 cohort is not just "no wallet." It is "no wallet because no working eID because no working PIN because the postal slip is lost." Document upload, in-person verification, or an existing legacy flow needs to absorb that segment without escalating to support.
• FAQ and support. Train support to recognise a PIN problem as the more common one. The script should be: "If you don't remember your eID PIN, here is the recovery link; we'll set your wallet aside and email you when you can complete the setup." Anything that asks the user to "fix this on the BMDS website and try again later" without that scaffolding will lose them.
• Merchant-driven outreach. Pre-warm activation in October–November 2026; pre-warm wallet awareness in December 2026; pre-warm the wallet-button press in January 2027. Three different campaigns, three different audience segments.

Treat activation status as a funnel data field

The technically straightforward thing to do, once your wallet integration is live, is to store an "activation status" inferred from the user's first interaction with the wallet button. Three states: completed wallet flow, abandoned at PIN-required step, abandoned before PIN-required step. The middle state is your most actionable cohort — these are users who would use the wallet, but cannot today. Email them a recovery link the same week. The conversion uplift on a re-engagement email targeting a specific identified blocker dramatically outperforms generic re-marketing.

This requires nothing the merchant does not already do for cart abandonment. It is the same playbook applied to a different drop-off point.

What this means outside Germany

The activation gap is a German specificity in detail and a European pattern in shape. Italy's IT-Wallet is bound to SPID and CIE — a credential set with over 41 million active users, which is structurally a different starting point. France Identité onboards through the new biometric national ID and is doing its own activation work, with public communications visible since late 2025. Spain has the legacy DNI electrónico smart card with a notoriously low activation rate; the Spanish activation gap is, structurally, larger than the German one. Hungary is at the opposite end — the existing Ügyfélkapu+ flow is a more reliable activated credential than the German eID has been in practice, and the Hungarian readiness equivalent of "do you have a working PIN" is closer to 60–70 % than to 18 %.

Merchants serving cross-border customers should map two columns onto each member state: the awareness cohort and the working-credential cohort. The two together set the realistic Q1 2027 conversion ceiling. A merchant who plans against awareness alone and discovers the activation gap in February 2027 will have lost the launch quarter.

Bottom line

The 27 April Bitkom number is not the same story as the 13 April number with new framing. It is the bottleneck moving downstream. Awareness can be closed in eight months by communication. Activation requires every individual user, on their own time and against a backlogged Bürgeramt system, to make a working credential exist on a particular phone before a particular date. That is a logistics problem, not a marketing problem. The merchants who treat it as part of their integration scope and pre-warm activation through Q4 2026 will land Q1 2027 with a usable funnel. The ones who wait for "the public" to fix it on their own will spend Q1 watching a high-intent cohort fail at the PIN step.

Eight months out, the choice is whether to pre-warm activation or to discover it.