GLEIF’s Digital Strategy for the LEI

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From banking to production and supply chain management, industries worldwide are adjusting to the digitization of processes and transactions.

Yet there is a fundamental principle that hinders this development: trust. How can an organization trust that a supplier located hundreds of kilometers away is who they say they are? How can persons verify that the organization receiving their personal data is indeed who they believe them to be? The process of confirming a stakeholder’s legal identity digitally has become a foundational requirement; it enables the determination of ‘who’s who’ within a digital community. And Digital Identity goes further than just onboarding new trading partners. It can be used to secure any type of transaction and messages. It is also used to guarantee the authenticity of any other digital product in an end-to-end fashion. Digital Identity can help implementing a modern Zero Trust Architecture, in which partners never trust without verification in a cryptographically sound way.

The Global LEI System (GLEIS) has a unique opportunity to solve the problem of trust for legal entities on a global scale. It can enable digital transformation in a way that is interoperable, independent and autonomous. As a regulatory endorsed system overseen by the Regulatory Oversight Committee (ROC), the GLEIS is the only system that establishes a recognized, monitored and standardized global identity for legal entities that, whenever possible, is linked to the national ID system in that jurisdiction. The system is underpinned by open data, meaning any person or company can access the LEI and its associated reference data. The GLEIS also bridges traditional and online processes by serving as a tool to identify the counterparty in any transaction and can aggregate data on legal entities held in repositories.

GLEIF’s digital strategy for the LEI centers on two methods for cryptographically binding the LEI to its organization – digital certificates and Verifiable Credentials.

• The LEI has a critical role to play in today’s digital world through its ability to provide organizations with unique, permanent identification globally. This especially is important in the context of identifying legal entities involved in digital transactions.
• LEI delivers value to both the more mature product - Digital Certificates - and the more recent innovation of Verifiable Credentials.