An electronic seal is the organisational counterpart to a signature. A legal entity creates it rather than a person, and it proves the origin and integrity of a document that entity issued.
Legal termReviewed 7 October 2026
In the trust layer that every party uses to check who signed what.
Issuer
Signs credentials: a member state, university, bank or employer
Issuance
EUDI Wallet
Belongs to the user, who decides what to share
Presentation
Relying party
The service that requests and checks the data
Trust layer: who is allowed to sign, and is it still valid?
Rules: the law and technical framework behind it all
A signature expresses a person’s intent to be bound. A seal says a document genuinely came from an organisation and has not been altered since. Invoices, certificates, statements and attestations are the usual cases.
A qualified electronic seal uses a qualified certificate issued to the entity, and gets a presumption of integrity and correct origin in law, much as a qualified signature gets legal equivalence to handwriting.
In the proposed European Business Wallet, seals sit next to mandates. The mandate says who may act for the entity. The seal says a document came from it.
Defined in
eIDAS Regulation Art. 35 and 36
If you issue documents customers forward to third parties, invoices, certificates, confirmations, a seal turns "we sent this" into something the recipient can check without calling you.
Where you meet it
