On September 30, 2026, Odoo and itsme® announced a partnership to integrate Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) natively into Odoo Sign (source: official Odoo blog). The feature ships with Odoo 20, unveiled at Brussels Expo during Odoo Experience 2026 (September 24–26). The qualified signature takes under a minute, authenticated through the itsme® app already installed by 8 million European users.
Context: leaving your ERP to sign is over
itsme® is a digital identity platform created in 2017, operated by a consortium of Belgium’s major banks (Belfius, BNP Paribas Fortis, KBC/CBC, ING), telecom operators (Orange Belgium, Proximus, Telenet), and the public fund SFPI with a 20% stake. It covers 32 European countries and processes 50 million actions per month across more than 20 sectors.
Before this partnership, obtaining a Qualified Electronic Signature (QES) — the only category recognised as legally equivalent to a handwritten signature under the eIDAS regulation across the EU — meant leaving your ERP entirely. You had to route through an external tool (DocuSign Advanced ID Verification, Connective, Universign…), handle authentication separately, wait for a certificate to be issued by an accredited Trust Service Provider (TSP), and then re-import the signed document into Odoo. That meant multiple manual steps, or an expensive API integration to maintain.
With native itsme® integration, this chain collapses into a single trigger in Odoo Sign, a mobile authentication on the signer’s phone (NFC, facial recognition, or personal code), and a certificate issued immediately by an EU-accredited TSP.
Impact for European businesses
The contracts–HR–procurement chain without leaving your ERP. For a CIO or HR team managing employment contracts, NDAs or amendments, the gain is immediate: one tool, one workflow, one archive. Fewer round-trips between interfaces reduces the risk of version errors or misattached files — a classic failure point in outsourced signing processes.
QES-level assurance in regulated sectors. The distinction between Simple (SES), Advanced (AES) and Qualified (QES) electronic signatures is not cosmetic. In pharmaceutical, aerospace and public procurement contexts, certain documents explicitly require QES to carry evidential weight in the event of a dispute. With itsme® integrated into Odoo Sign, organisations can standardise at this assurance level with no third-party markup, across every document that demands it.
A Belgian-first footprint, extensible to 32 countries. itsme® leads the Belgian market but operates across 32 European countries. For a mid-market company with Belgian headquarters and subsidiaries in the Netherlands, France or Germany, the platform can cover local signers without multiplying qualified-signature vendors.
What to watch out for
The primary watch point is adoption dependency on the signer’s side. itsme® requires a mobile app that the other party must already have installed. For a Belgian employee or a supplier active in the local banking and telecom ecosystem, near-total coverage is realistic. For a supplier based outside the itsme® footprint, or an SME without the app, the signing experience will differ: confirm that your Odoo Sign configuration keeps a fallback mechanism (AES or SES) in place before rolling out QES as the default workflow.
The second consideration is the migration timeline. Odoo 20 has been available since late September 2026: organisations running Odoo 16 or 17 will need to review their upgrade plan before native itsme® integration is accessible.
For more on the regulatory landscape around signatures and compliance in Europe, see our eIDAS 2 and ERP: practical impact on invoices, signatures and archiving, our guide to mandatory Peppol e-invoicing in Belgium, and our analysis of Odoo self-implementation: real costs and the integrator threshold.
