The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) has reached a new milestone with the deployment of its first verifiable Legal Entity Identifier (vLEI) to sign the organisation’s 2021 annual report.
The vLEI is a digital version of the LEI, which intends to meet an “urgent need” for automated digital verification of the legal identities of businesses.
GLEIF indicates that the vLEI “instils confidence in the verified identity of digital counterparties”, allowing them to interact, innovate and collaborate across borders, free of the requirement to perform verification of an organisation’s LEI, and persons that represent their organisations manually.
GLEIF’s annual report illustrates that vLEIs can be used to sign specific sections within a report or data set as well as for signing reports in their entirety.
GLEIF is now working to finalise a qualification programme to enable vLEI issuers to become operational later in the year. GLEIF expects vLEI issuance services to rollout through these qualified issuers shortly.
Stephan Wolf, chief executive officer at GLEIF, comments: “The publication of GLEIF’s 2021 annual report provides an opportunity to showcase the ability of the vLEI to verify, automatically and in real-time, that the report and its signatories are who they claim to be.
“The vLEI has a critical role to play in today’s digital world through its ability to provide organisations with unique, permanent verified digital identification globally. This is especially important in the context of identifying legal entities involved in digital transactions, where manual background checks inflate costs and cause huge unnecessary delays.”
GLEIF’s vision is that there should be one global identity behind every business. The vLEI is expected by the organisation to play a crucial part in making this vision a reality.
More than two million legal entities around the world identify themselves internationally using an LEI, a global business identity system backed and overseen by the G20, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and a group of worldwide public authorities, says GLEIF.
