Transforming Organizational Identity in 2025 and Beyond
As global businesses embrace emerging technologies including tokenization, decentralized identity, and AI-driven compliance, the need for reliable, interoperable, and scalable digital identity solutions has never been greater. The verifiable Legal Entity Identifier (vLEI) is set to revolutionize digital organizational identity, offering automated authentication and verification for legal entities. In this blog, Alexandre Kech, GLEIF CEO, explores how the vLEI mitigates fraud, enhances transaction security, and provides a reliable mechanism to verify legal entities in a rapidly digitizing economy.
Author: Alexandre Kech
Date: 2025-02-13
Views:
With digital transformation accelerating, ensuring the authenticity of organizational actors is crucial. The future of business transactions will hinge on digital verifiability – where trust isn’t assumed but cryptographically proven.
To meet this need, GLEIF is working to empower digital trust in financial ecosystems through an open, verifiable organizational identity. The Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) has long been a cornerstone for identifying businesses in financial transactions. Now, the verifiable LEI (vLEI) marks a significant leap toward a future built on digital trust.
The vLEI is a new form of digitized organizational identity. Uniquely, it provides automated and non-repudiable verification of an organization’s identity, as well as that of the individuals acting on its behalf. The vLEI addresses critical needs to tackle emerging identity-based risks, namely the permissions and authentication of organizational identity and the digital signing and submission of official documentation (such as filings, reports, data), including the signing of the content therein.
Given this ability, there is a clear opportunity for the vLEI and its supporting infrastructure to become the prominent protocol and technology ecosystem for verifiable organizational credentials.
By examining three key issues that stand to impact the global economy in 2025 and beyond – namely, the ongoing fight against financial crime and instability, the emergence of sophisticated deepfakes, and the need to ease international supply chains – we see how the vLEI’s vast potential is already being realized:
1. Taking the fight to global financial crime and instability
There is already robust industry support for the LEI and vLEI to be used to deliver faster, cheaper, more transparent, and inclusive cross-border transactions. Regulatory advocates for the LEI include the Financial Stability Board (FSB), Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS) Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI), Swift Payments Market Practice Group (PMPG), and The Wolfsberg Group. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has also launched an ongoing consultation on proposed updates to FATF Recommendation 16 to include globally standardized entity identifiers such as the LEI.
A recent survey from the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) also found the LEI continues to be the preferred and most effective identifier for legal entities in financial markets. An overwhelming 83% of respondents chose the LEI as their primary identifier, highlighting its global adoption, reliability, and interoperability.
Upcoming regulatory and industry developments promise to build on this support to promote increased trust and stability across the financial ecosystem, and GLEIF is committed to expanding engagement with these key stakeholders – and others – to explore emerging opportunities for the vLEI amid the widespread digitalization of financial services.
This comes at a crucial juncture. While digitalization promises huge economic opportunities, it creates new risks. Interpol’s 2024 Global Financial Fraud Assessment predicts that the “magnitude of financial fraud [will] grow in tandem with technological advancements and the expansion of virtual services across the globe.”
Digitalization also presents a threat to financial stability as institutions increasingly depend on third-party ICT service providers to support critical functions and deliver core services directly. The EU’s new Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) offers a framework to start addressing this challenge and highlights the importance of standardized, verifiable organizational identification as a critical enabler of cyber resiliency and trust in digital ecosystems. This marks an important regulatory precedent that should be replicated across all corners of the global economy and can be directly supported by the LEI and vLEI.
2. Deepfakes demand a new approach to organizational identity
Advances in generative artificial intelligence have seen the sophistication and use of deepfake videos, communications, and documents increase rapidly. This exposes long-standing shortfalls in organizational identity, with confidence in digital authenticity eroding rapidly amid the spiraling risk and impact of impersonation fraud.
The vLEI counters the growing threat of deepfake fraud by confirming the verified identities of an organization, its official representatives across digital channels, and the provenance and authenticity of the communications and content.
This potential to restore digital trust promises to be transformative. Take the telecoms industry, where the vLEI is being tested to help address the challenges of scam calls and messages by enabling organizations engaged in outbound calling and text messaging to provide digitized proof that both the organization and the communication itself are authentic. With deepfakes on the rise across the sector, there is a compelling opportunity for the application of the vLEI to be extended to meet emerging challenges.
3. Digitalizing global supply chains can unlock trillions in economic opportunity
Despite significant investment in the digitalization of global supply chains, a report from ICC UK highlights the challenges posed by fragmented data standards and systems, with only 1-2% of trade documents handled in digital form. The end result of this complexity and inefficiency is a $2.7 trillion trade finance gap that disproportionately impacts small businesses and developing economies.
By equipping organizations with a globally standardized digital identifier, the vLEI promises to harmonize trade transactions and unlock unprecedented efficiencies across global supply chains. In the maritime industry, for example, it is already being used to enable the seamless exchange of electronic trade documents across borders and jurisdictions.
This brings us closer to realizing digitalized trade, which, according to the ICC UK report, could help bolster global growth by $9 trillion across the G7, $1 trillion across the Commonwealth, and $1 trillion across the ASEAN – freeing $500 billion in trapped cash and closing the trade finance gap by 50%.
By boosting transparency, the vLEI also helps organizations to make informed decisions about trading partners, reduce financial and reputational risks, and build a strong foundation for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) efforts and reporting.
A Growing vLEI Infrastructure
As the reach and impact of the vLEI continues to grow, an increasingly expansive ecosystem is playing a key enabling role.
In October 2024, ISO published ISO 17442-3:2024 to standardize the vLEI – marking “a significant improvement in infrastructure that further increases the value of [the] global legal identifier system."
Standardization has been complemented by a growing network of Qualified vLEI Issuers (QVIs) who are authorized to issue vLEIs to legal entities. This network stands to be bolstered in the coming months by the various organizations worldwide currently undergoing the Qualification Program under the GLEIF vLEI Ecosystem Framework.
As the ecosystem continues to build in both scale and importance, additional resources and expertise are required to meet the dynamic needs of industries everywhere. The establishment of the cross-industry vLEI Technical Advisory Board is providing technical, governance, and developmental support. Ivan Mortimer-Schutts has also joined GLEIF in the newly created role of Global Head of vLEI, equipping us to continue delivering excellence as we build toward our goal of hardwiring trusted organizational identity into every business relationship.
Looking ahead, driving the growth of the vLEI business and ecosystem requires an ongoing focus on global adoption and fostering strategic partnerships. Financial institutions, regulatory bodies, and technology providers across industries are already playing a crucial role in advancing the vLEI framework, ensuring its widespread integration into the digital economy. Now is the time for all organizations to embrace the vLEI and future-proof their identity in a world where trust is built on cryptographic certainty.
If you would like to comment on a blog post, please identify yourself with your first and last name. Your name will appear next to your comment. Email addresses will not be published. Please note that by accessing or contributing to the discussion board you agree to abide by the terms of the GLEIF Blogging Policy, so please read them carefully.
Alexandre Kech is the CEO of the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF).
Prior to joining GLEIF, Alexandre Kech was Head of Digital Securities at the SIX Digital Exchange. As a member of the Executive Board, Alex had full executive responsibility for the Digital Securities business vertical, including sales and relationship management, product development, business design, and ecosystem expansion.
Over the past 25 years, Alex has constructed a unique career combining finance at BNY Mellon, payments/securities infrastructure and standards at SWIFT, and blockchain and digital assets at Onchain Custodian (ONC) and, most recently, Citi Ventures. As co-founder and CEO of ONC, Alex led the Singapore and Shanghai-based team that built custody and prime brokerage services for crypto and other digital assets from scratch. As Blockchain & Digital Asset director at Citi Ventures, he built a team to engage the European ecosystem on emerging use cases for blockchain technologies and digital assets.
Alex is also involved in industry and standardization initiatives. As the convenor of the ISO TC 68 / SC8 / WG3, which produced the ISO 24165 Digital Token Identifier (DTI), he is a member of the DTI Foundation Product Advisory Committee. He also recently served as co-chair of the Global Digital Finance (gdf.io) custody working group.
Alex earned a bachelor’s degree in translation and an Executive MBA from the Quantic School of Business and Technology while building Onchain Custodian, putting theory into practice in real-time.
