Imagine the following scene.

A bank clerk in Bucharest looks up from her desk and sees a queue forming. In front of her stand six customers, each holding a completely different type of Romanian ID. One has the old bulletin booklet, soft at the edges and smelling faintly of socialism. Another holds the classic plastic card, confident and familiar. Next to him, someone clutches a temporary cardboard ID that looks like it escaped from a board game. Behind them waits the CEI pilot version - the overachiever child of the group - followed by the brand new electronic ID with a chip. And at the end, the simple non-chip ID, Romania’s minimalist experiment.

If Kafka had written fintech, this would have been chapter one.

You can almost hear the bank clerk thinking: “Who designed this? And more importantly… why?”

Because yes, all six types of ID are still valid in 2025.
Welcome to the Romanian identity paradox!

The real issue isn’t the paperwork comedy. It’s the consequence. Romania, for all its digital ambition, still holds an unwanted European distinction: the highest percentage of unbanked adults. Almost one in three Romanians lives outside the formal financial system. Not because they don’t want a bank account, most do, but because identity, in practice, is the gatekeeper to participation. No valid ID, no account. No account, no credit. No credit… well, you know how the story goes.

This isn’t uniquely Romanian. According to the World Bank, around 850 million people globally have no official ID at all. Imagine not being able to prove who you are — not just to a bank, but to your doctor, your employer, your government, even to buy a SIM card. Identity is not a document. It is a permission slip for life.

And here comes the paradox. Romania is not offline.
Far from it.

Romanians live on their phones. They stream, scroll, shop, argue, flirt, work, learn, and pay taxes online. Depending on the source, somewhere between 90 and 94 percent of the country is connected. Mobile connections actually outnumber people. Romania has better internet speeds than many Western nations. If online activity could power cities, Bucharest would glow like Las Vegas.

And yet, only a fraction of Romanians use internet banking.
And only a little more than half have a bank account at all.

Hyper-connected, yet digitally underbanked.
Modern behaviour, ancient infrastructure.
It’s like driving a Formula 1 car on a forest road — we have the speed, but not the track.

Now imagine, just for a moment, a different future.

In this version, AI doesn’t care whether your ID is a booklet, a plastic card, a prototype from Cluj, or a cardboard square that looks ashamed of itself. It simply verifies it. Quickly, accurately, without judgment. Your digital identity lives in a wallet on your phone. You can prove you're over 18 without revealing your birthday, sign documents with a thumbprint instead of a printer, and open a bank account in minutes, not months. A farmer in Oltenia could apply for a micro-loan while standing in a field, no travel, no paper, no “reveniți mâine.”

This isn’t science fiction.
It’s eIDAS 2.0, ROeID, and the European Digital Identity Wallet combined with AI-powered verification that’s already being deployed across the world.

So why aren’t we there yet?

Well, systems don’t change just because technology exists. People need to trust it. Institutions need to adopt it. And someone, somewhere, has to make the brave decision to retire six ID formats and agree on one. Until then, banks will keep juggling them all, citizens will choose the path of least resistance, and digital inclusion will climb at the speed of administrative reform… which is to say, slowly.

My take is simple: identity is not a piece of plastic. It’s the key that unlocks participation in modern society. Right now, Romania has six keys rattling around at once, some bent, some shiny, some experimental, some nostalgic. But tomorrow, it could have a single digital door — a wallet-based identity backed by ROeID and the European framework, secure enough to trust and simple enough for everyone to use.

The paradox isn’t that Romania has six IDs. The paradox is that it has everything it needs to build something better: fast internet, high smartphone adoption, a young digital culture, and yet the system still runs on the paperwork of the past.

The good news? Paradoxes are meant to be resolved.
This one just needs courage, clarity, and a bit of architectural cleanup.

When identity becomes invisible, inclusion becomes inevitable.
And that is a future worth building.