Sustainability in business has become more nuanced. Going paperless is a good start, but it is now just as important to talk about the digital infrastructure behind that transition.
The International Energy Agency projects that global electricity demand from data centers could rise to about 945 TWh by 2030 (up from about 415 TWh in 2024), with AI as a major driver. And if your ID verification and signing relies on hosted services, long retention, and repeated validation checks, that trend will show up in your footprint as well.
However, none of this means digital ID verification cannot improve sustainability.
It only means the answer depends on how the process is built: how often users have to retry, what evidence is stored and for how long, and how high-assurance signing, such as Qualified Electronic Signatures, fits into the flow.
In this article, we will take a balanced look at where the sustainability gains from ID verification are real, and where they are hardly possible.
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What is a Qualified Electronic Signature, and why is it relevant for sustainability?
A qualified electronic signature (QES) is the highest-assurance type of electronic signature under the EU’s eIDAS regulations. In practical terms, it’s a digital signature created using a protected signing key (a qualified signature creation device or service) and backed by a qualified digital certificate issued by a Qualified Trust Service Provider (QTSP).
Because the certificate links the signing key to a verified person, a QES requires structured identity proofing at some point. If the signer already has a valid qualified certificate, that proofing may have happened earlier, and the signing flow involves reusing that earlier result rather than repeating it. The payoff is that, under eIDAS, a qualified electronic signature has the same legal effect as a handwritten signature throughout the EU.
To see its importance in the context of sustainability, let’s use a concrete example:
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The customer completes online identity verification (identity document capture, document authenticity checks, and live biometric capture and matching).
The system performs identity proofing at a defined reliability level, and the result is used to establish or confirm the signer’s identity for certificate issuance.
A QTSP issues a qualified digital certificate (or confirms an existing one) under the eIDAS regulations.
The customer signs, producing a legally meaningful record with a defined legal effect in the EU context.
Over time, the organization may validate the signature again during audits, disputes, or retention checks.
In a well-run setup, this type of flow can support the principles of sustainable development because it can reduce physical handling:
Fewer branch visits for checks and signing.
Less shipping and mailing of paper packs or supporting paperwork.
Less physical archiving and fewer “print again, sign again” loops.
Still, there are caveats. The same flow can deliver little value for sustainability if:
Users retry repeatedly (poor capture UX, frequent manual escalations).
You keep raw video/images and duplicate evidence indefinitely by default.
You run everything on inefficient hosting and treat energy use as a non-issue.
To make better conclusions, let’s examine each side of the story in greater detail.
Where digital identity verification does help
When digital ID verification systems reduce footprint, the savings usually come from removing physical handling that nobody wants. These gains are not guaranteed, but they are very common in real deployments.
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Less paper usually means simpler logistics
Paper workflows rarely mean “just paper,” as they often involve printing, scanning, off-site storage, and transport. On top of that, it sometimes only takes a missing page, a wrong version, or a signature in the wrong spot to restart the whole loop.
And the scale of paper flows is not trivial: Eurostat’s packaging waste statistics reveal that the EU generated 79.7 million tons of packaging waste in 2023, and paper and cardboard accounted for 32.3 million tons (40.4%).
Luckily, QES and digital ID verification can reduce this paper waste under certain conditions. But they will only deliver sustainability gains once they fully replace paper-based workflows, rather than swapping for a scanned image of a handwritten signature.
Removing travel and hand-offs
The cryptographic act of signing is tiny compared with what surrounds it. In many onboarding scenarios, the heavier part is people moving: a customer visiting a branch, staff checking copies, couriers transporting tokens, back offices chasing missing fields.
If a process can do identity proofing remotely with low exception rates, it can help avoid many trips and physical hand-offs that add fuel use and time cost. That is one reason financial services teams, for example, often care about high-assurance digital signatures for loan agreements, investment contracts, and account changes.
Remote signing can cut device churn — in the right setup
It’s worth mentioning that a QES deployment that relies on per-user tokens can add its own logistics: manufacturing, shipping, replacement, returns, and helpdesk resets. A remote model can still reduce physical device cycles if the hosted part is run well.
For example, Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/1567 sets rules for managing remote qualified signature and seal creation devices as qualified trust services. In practice, this standardization can make remote qualified signing easier to run consistently, which can reduce token shipping and paper fallbacks in some programs (depending on the operating model).
Where digital identity verification may not help
Even strong systems have digital costs, including electricity and cooling for servers, network traffic, compute for verification and fraud checks, as well as log and audit storage. And those costs can grow fast when teams treat storage and retries as something of secondary importance.
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Data-center energy can’t be underestimated
The aforementioned IEA projection about data-center electricity demand is a big signal to any digital ID verification service. If paper costs get replaced with a hosted stack, the quality of that stack matters. Cooling, power supply, and hardware utilization can dominate the footprint at scale and can outweigh any potential benefit.
Water and local constraints matter as well
UNEP’s 2025 Sustainable Procurement Guidelines for Data Centres and Servers points teams to measurable criteria such as power usage effectiveness (PUE) and water usage effectiveness (WUE). The EU also treats data-center sustainability as something tracked with indicators: a 2025 technical report supporting the Energy Efficiency Directive reporting scheme assesses energy performance and sustainability of data centers using reported data and KPIs.
So, “paper saved” does not automatically mean “impact reduced” — hosting choices matter, and in 2025, businesses have more guidance to support better vendor and infrastructure selection.
Rebound effects in identity data
Digital workflows can create more documents than paper ever did, because creating a file may seem cheap. The same happens with evidence: teams keep raw video and high-resolution images because storage feels cheap, then backups multiply it.
Sometimes keeping raw evidence is reasonable for fraud investigations or for a dispute window. The waste starts when retention becomes indefinite by default.
This is where ID verification can drift away from the principles of sustainable development because unnecessary identity data and personal information can sit in storage for years, adding risk and long-term cost.
What actions will tip the balance?
At a high level, the sustainability question comes down to retries plus retention.
Lower retries reduce wasted compute and staff time. Tighter retention reduces storage and backup load, and it reduces privacy risk tied to identity data.
Identity proofing: Quality controls how often you repeat the work
If verifying identities fails frequently, the process repeats. That adds more capture sessions, more helpdesk interactions, more human review, and sometimes a return to paper.
For digital ID verification, “quality” often means practical engineering: capture guidance that gets readable images of identity documents, early checks that detect common capture errors, and fallbacks that avoid a full restart when a single field fails. Retry rate is the hidden multiplier behind the footprint.
Evidence minimization
Teams often store raw media “just in case,” which becomes harder to justify once the dispute window passes.
A practical rule that often helps: store decision records and cryptographic proofs where possible, and keep raw media only when policy or disputes truly require it. That reduces long-lived storage of personal information and identity data, which supports the principles of sustainable development.
The verdict: Digital ID verification is a good step towards sustainability (if done well)
Digital ID verification can support sustainability, but it is not guaranteed.
The truth part tends to show up when the process genuinely replaces printing, shipping, and in-person steps, and when identity proofing is strong enough that the flow does not collapse into retries and manual recovery.
The myth part shows up when businesses stop using, but still keep every draft, store raw media forever, and run the whole system in inefficient hosting while ignoring energy and water metrics.
To increase the positive impact on sustainability, you can track a small set of operational metrics:
Decision in Identity Proofing Stack | Changes in Footprint | What to Measure in Production |
|---|---|---|
Reduce retry loops | Fewer repeated captures and reviews | Average attempts per pass, manual review rate |
Limit retention of raw media | Less storage and fewer backups | Stored GB per completed case, deletion compliance rate |
Use remote signing under qualified trust services | Less device logistics, more hosting dependence | Token shipments, hosting KPIs published by provider |
Separate legal record from drafts | Fewer duplicated files | Signed artifacts per transaction, version count before signing |
These are not perfect metrics, but they map directly to operational waste. They also line up with the principles of sustainable development by linking impact to things you can measure and fix.
How Regula IDV Platform can help sustainability for your business
If you want your digital ID verification to produce sustainability gains, the hard part is not running one check. It’s running the same flow thousands of times with low friction, low retry rates, and disciplined handling of personal information and identity data. That’s where a robust, all-in-one identity lifecycle management platform can make a huge difference.
For example, a solution like Regula IDV Platform is built to perform сustomizable workflows & scenarios, including document and biometric verification, automated AML/ PEP screening and structured user data management.
In a QES-related journey, Regula IDV Platform typically sits before the trust service step: it runs a full-scale authentication check and produces a structured result that a relying party or QTSP can use when issuing a digital certificate for qualified electronic signatures.
Based on this, you can expect:
Fewer retries in digital ID verification.
Less duplicate evidence collection.
A more disciplined data lifecycle.
Fewer “paper comfort” fallbacks.
Have any more questions? Contact the Regula team now — we are here to help!
