EU Finalizes eFTI Platform Certification Rules

On 6 November 2025, the European Commission adopted Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2243, the technical rulebook that spells out exactly what an eFTI platform has to do to get certified for exchanging freight data with national authorities. This is the piece that was genuinely missing. The 2024 acts told everyone what data fields belong in an eCMR or a customs declaration. This one tells software vendors how their platform has to behave, technically, to be allowed anywhere near that data.

If your TMS or EDI provider has been saying "we're eFTI-ready" for the past year, this regulation is the first real yardstick to hold them against. Here's the timeline that matters:

As of January 2026, eFTI platforms and service providers can start preparing for operations, and Member States authorities may start accepting data stored on certified eFTI platforms for inspection. As of 9 July 2027, the eFTI Regulation will apply in full, and Member State authorities must accept information shared electronically by operators via certified eFTI platforms. That's under a year from now.

What 2025/2243 actually specifies

The regulation is not abstract policy language. It defines concrete platform behavior. Two things stand out for anyone running freight through a TMS.

First, authenticated access. For access and processing of eFTI data by means of human-to-machine interfaces, eFTI platforms have to provide functionalities that ensure identification schemes complying, as a minimum, with the requirements laid down in the eIDAS regulation. Machine-to-machine communication gets its own separate set of requirements per connected system. This is why "we support eFTI" as a checkbox on a vendor feature sheet means very little without knowing which identification and connection method they've actually built.

Second, selective, authorized data sharing. Access by economic operators to eFTI platforms has to be ensured through secure and transparent access management mechanisms, and only authorised users should be able to access and process eFTI data on behalf of economic operators. In practice, that's your platform generating machine-readable access credentials, deciding who inside your business (or on the carrier side) sees which document, and logging every request. Platforms also have to let business users request and receive notifications, including periodical reports, covering requests for access to eFTI data by competent authorities. None of this is optional polish. It's the certification requirement.

The national gate problem nobody's vendor deck mentions

Here's what gets left out of most "get ready for eFTI" content: certification against the EU spec is one thing, but every Member State runs its own eFTI gate, and vendors have tested against wildly different numbers of them. Vediafi has participated in eFTI development since the very beginning, and its platform was the first one tested with a national gate. Pionira NV is positioned as a European e-document provider preparing to operate as a certified eFTI platform, with plans for secure, standardized digital exchange fully compliant with EU eFTI regulations. GBK Trusted Partner is the specialist in digital documents for dangerous goods transport and the only TP1-platform certified by the German Ministry of Transportation. A live demonstration of the German gate involved Toll Collect, the Federal Office for Mobility and Logistics (BALM), IN Groupe, and GBK Trusted Partner, showcasing a simulated real-time customs inspection based on eFTI data. Pilots are running separately in Austria, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Lithuania and Portugal, each with its own gate, its own timeline, and its own quirks. If you run freight through Germany, France and Poland, "eFTI-ready" from a vendor tested only against the German gate is a partial answer at best. This applies whether you're evaluating a full suite like Descartes, MercuryGate, Blue Yonder, SAP TM or Oracle TM, a specialist like Alpega, or a leaner carrier-connectivity layer such as Cargoson. The question to ask isn't whether eFTI shows up on the feature list. It's which national gates they've actually connected to and tested.

The checklist to run before your next contract renewal

• Ask your TMS or EDI vendor to name Regulation (EU) 2025/2243 specifically in their certification roadmap, in writing, with a date, not a slide that says "eFTI readiness in progress."
• Ask which national eFTI gates they've tested against and get the list, since pilot maturity varies enormously between Germany, France, Italy and the rest.
• Confirm the platform can generate machine-readable access links and support authenticated human-to-machine and machine-to-machine connections, since these are explicit functional requirements, not future add-ons.
• Confirm selective data sharing with business partners is built in, so you can grant a carrier or customs broker access to one shipment's data without exposing everything else.
• Get a written commitment tied to the 9 July 2027 deadline, not a general assurance that "we'll be ready."

Why waiting costs you the choice

The Commission frames this less as a cliff-edge deadline and more as a phased operational shift, and industry stakeholders expect the transition to accelerate throughout 2026. Carriers who get their platforms certified early will spend the second half of 2026 telling their shipper customers which system to plug into. If you haven't asked your own vendor the hard questions by then, you won't be choosing a platform. You'll be handed one. The Commission's own estimate is that the shift could save the EU logistics sector up to €1 billion per year once it's fully running, and that saving goes to the companies that migrated on schedule, not the ones still asking "what's eFTI again" in Q2 2027.

Put the vendor question on this quarter's agenda, not next year's. Ask for the certification roadmap in writing, ask for the gate list, and make the answer part of your next TMS or EDI contract renewal, not an afterthought bolted on after the fact.