Secure means of identification and authentication is key to many services such as in e-government or e-commerce. Several countries have issued national electronic identity (eID) infrastructure to support such services. These initiatives however have often emerged as national islands; using eID cross-border has not been on the agenda in most cases. This creates electronic barriers. The Large Scale Pilot STORK aims at taking down such barriers by developing an interoperability framework between national eID solutions. The framework is tested in six concrete cross-border applications. In this paper, an overview of the STORK architecture and the pilot applications is given.