Europe’s Digital Notarisation Moment: Scaling Trust Beyond Borders

Across Europe, digital notarisation is moving forward, but not in the way many might imagine. France processed more than 5.1 million authentic notarial acts last year, Belgium around 1.25 million, and the Netherlands close to 1.9 million. 

These volumes sit atop notarial systems that are, by design, nationally organised and centrally governed, reflecting long-standing legal traditions and public mandates. At the same time, rapid advances in digital identity and electronic trust services are reshaping how cross-border transactions operate in practice - creating a clear opening for the next phase of digital notarisation to build on Europe’s strong national foundations and extend them beyond borders.

Remote notarisation is now possible across Europe,  with some Member States actively enabling online execution within their respective legal frameworks. Notaries in Sweden can perform notarial acts remotely or electronically. In France, the Chambre des Notaires currently permits remote execution for procurations. Belgium’s digital powers of attorney operate exclusively within Fednot’s national ecosystem. In the Netherlands, full remote appearance is still restricted to digital BV incorporations, under frameworks set by the Ministry of Justice and KNB. Luxembourg requires electronic deeds to be executed via the Chamber of Notaries’ mandated platform, or they are legally void. Austria offers broad online capabilities, with chamber-run systems supporting a wide variety of digital deeds; other independent providers enable remote appointments whose documents can be used internationally, but these services remain firmly rooted in Austrian law. Together, these approaches demonstrate a clear European pattern: strong national implementations are being put in place - creating a robust base from which interoperability and cross-border extension can logically evolve.

In practice, Europe is digitising while preserving institutional control - and this is a conscious legal and political choice. The authentic notarial act is regarded as a matter of state sovereignty, not commercial infrastructure. Legal certainty is preserved not through open competition but through state-mandated professional control. Digital tools can modernise and optimize processes/procedures, but they do not alter the underlying premise that the authority to create public faith resides with national institutions.

Closed national digital ecosystems offer consistency and legal certainty, but their inward focus naturally limits scalability. Designed to modernise established processes rather than to function as open platforms, most national notarial solutions were never intended to support B2B integrations, API-level connectivity, or seamless cross-border workflows. 

For enterprises, the consequence is operational rather than legal: cross-border transactions  - whether in real estate, corporate structuring, succession, financing, or multinational compliance - still demand manual coordination across jurisdictions, languages, identity schemes, and evidentiary standards. While the law remains national, economic activity is decisively cross-border, and the growing mismatch between connected markets and disconnected notarial systems is opening a clear space for interoperable solutions.

Europe, however, is firmly in motion. Across the Nordics, Baltics, Benelux, the UK, and beyond, digital identity infrastructures and remote verification frameworks are expanding rapidly. The evolution of eIDAS and the introduction of European Digital Identity Wallets point to a future in which trusted digital credentials move seamlessly across borders. The EU’s broader competitiveness agenda is accelerating the same shift. The European Economic Security Strategy explicitly links Europe’s capabilities in digital infrastructure, AI, semiconductors, and data governance to economic resilience and geopolitical autonomy. Digital Decade 2030 targets reinforce the need for an integrated digital economy, while the European Data Strategy and the Data Act seek to build a single market for data as a driver of competitiveness and innovation. Alongside this, large-scale investments, from EU AI programmes to the European Investment Bank’s Tech Champions initiative, treat digital capability not as a regulatory discussion but as a core strategic pillar for competing globally.

Against this backdrop, the opportunity for Legitify does not rely on rewriting national notarial laws - or attempting to replace existing institutions. The opportunity is in enabling everything that can be digitised around the notarial act. Core workflows surrounding notarisation: identity verification, KYC, document intake, routing, validation, evidence management, legalisation, and audit trails, can already be digitised under existing regulatory structures, including the eIDAS framework for electronic trust services. Notaries in several jurisdictions already operate digitally, and in some markets, remote execution of notarial acts is fully established. In Estonia, almost all notarial acts can be carried out by remote authentication via the state e-notary system; In Sweden notarial deed can be carried out remotely or electronically;  in Austria, notarial deeds can be executed by video conference with electronic signatures; in the Netherlands, BVs can be incorporated through a fully digital notarial deed;  in Belgium, digital signing of notarial deeds, including by videoconference, is now embedded in practice etc.

The greatest inefficiencies do not sit within the statutory act itself but in the operational layers that surround it. These layers account for the majority of enterprise friction in cross-border transactions -   and they do not require legislative overhaul to improve. They require what national systems were never designed to deliver: interoperable orchestration across jurisdictions, trust frameworks, and workflows.

This is precisely where Legitify creates value, not by challenging national systems, but by connecting them. Legitify operates at the orchestration layer above these systems, enabling enterprises to manage cross-border notarisation workflows end to end. Legitify digitises everything around the notarial act - the majority of work that is essential, complex, and still largely fragmented. Where national platforms digitalise domestically,  we enable continuity across borders. Where the law safeguards centralisation, we support lawful mobility. 

In a Europe where digital notarisation remains national by design, the story is not one of constraint but of transition. Regulatory frameworks are evolving, digital identity and trust services are maturing, and the strategic imperative to strengthen the European Single Market is clearer than ever. This creates both a gap and an opportunity: the need to connect, standardise, and streamline cross-border notarisation workflows, and the opportunity for Legitify to enable the next phase of digital notarisation by making those workflows seamless, compliant, and scalable in a globally connected economy.

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