Marc rents vans and city cars across three branches. Every contract starts with a licence laid on the counter that he cannot actually verify. Marc is a fictional character, but his bill is computed on our real pricing.
The photocopy that proves nothing
The ritual is the same everywhere: photocopy the licence, file it, and hope. A decent fake passes that check effortlessly, and a vehicle that leaves on a fake licence rarely comes back: uncovered claim, disputed excess, proceedings. A single lost van costs more than years of verification. Meanwhile, the cabinet fills up with copies of identity documents that must be protected and purged.
The mobile driving licence changes the equation
The mobile driving licence (mDL, ISO/IEC 18013-5) is
cryptographically signed by the authority that issued it.
Verifying it takes neither a magnifying glass nor intuition: the
proof is authentic or it is not, categories and validity
included, and selective disclosure lets you request exactly what
you need (a valid category B, without the customer's address).
The European Union agreed in 2025 on a digital driving licence
living in the European identity wallet; the technical format is
already stable, and Todis verifies it today (doctype
org.iso.18013.5.1.mDL, the same mdoc engine as for
identity documents).
Concretely, it works both ways round his business: at online booking through the hosted flow (the customer verifies their licence from home, the car is ready when they arrive), and at the counter with the branch's QR screen (the customer scans, the agent sees the result arrive).
The bill, precisely
Around twenty-five contracts a day for one branch is close to 500 verifications a month. A verification counts two billed calls (create the journey, confirm the result), so about a thousand requests a month: on the Standard plan, a €12.50 base and 500 requests beyond the 500 included, €52.50 a month.
| Approach | Cost for 500 contracts/month | What it proves |
|---|---|---|
| Photocopy at the counter | no visible cost | nothing, plus a cabinet of sensitive documents |
| Outsourced document check (licence + identity) | ~€750 (~€1.50 per case) | an image analysis, not a state signature |
| Todis, Standard plan | €52.50 (€12.50 + overage) | cryptographic authenticity, validity, categories |
Fourteen times cheaper than document checks, and above all a different kind of proof: you are not judging a photo, you are verifying a signature. Nothing is stored, neither at Marc's nor at ours.
What about the timeline?
Same transparency as usual on this blog: citizen wallets roll out through late 2026 and 2027, relying party registries open on December 24, 2026, and the European digital driving licence will generalise progressively after them. A rental company that plugs verification in now, against the European test ecosystem, rides the transition without redoing anything: the day the first customer holds out a phone instead of a piece of plastic, the branch is ready.
Sources: ISO/IEC 18013-5 (mobile driving licence); EU co-legislators' agreement on the revised driving licence directive (2025, digital licence in the European wallet); Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 (eIDAS 2.0); published price lists of document verification vendors (for example Stripe Identity, about €1.50 per verification); Todis pricing.