Business wallets and AI agents drive demand for verifiable organizational identity across borders
CategoriesBiometrics News | Civil / National ID | Financial Services
Developments in digital public infrastructure have primarily focused on identity for individuals, but as financial markets, cross-border commerce and digital services become increasingly automated, organizational identity is becoming an infrastructure issue. Businesses need a trusted way to establish their identity across borders and market infrastructures and prove who is authorized to act on their behalf.
The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation, or GLEIF, believes globally verifiable organizational identity is the model that is needed to support finance and trade as AI agents move the economy toward automated transactions.
A legal entity identifier (LEI) is a unique 20-character alphanumeric code used to identify legal entities participating in financial transactions. Based on the ISO 17442 “Financial services — Legal entity identifier (LEI)” standard, it is intended to help identify legal entities on a globally accessible database, providing clear data about ownership. LEIs identify legal entities rather than individuals acting in a personal capacity. Thus, the public LEI data pool serves as a de facto global directory of non-individual participants in the financial market.
LEIs are issued by GLEIF-accredited organizations known as Local Operating Units (LOUs), which verify and maintain legal entity reference data.
Verifiable credential binds person to business
A digital extension of the LEI, the verifiable LEI or vLEI is the legal entity identifier in verifiable digital credential format. It uses cryptography to combine three identity sources: the entity’s identity as represented by its LEI, an individual’s personal identity, and the official organizational role they hold. This trinity of organization, person and role binds individuals to an organization and creates a cryptographically verifiable chain of credentials linked to an LEI record in the Global LEI Index.
The vLEI can be used in any kind of digital interaction, transaction or e-signature scenario – for instance, signing regulatory filings and reports, or authorizing business payments. As such, as wallet technology extends to encompass business wallet schemes such as the European Business Wallet (EBW), the vLEI could play a key role in anchoring the emergent digital public infrastructure in what GLEIF calls “the only open, standardized, and regulatory-endorsed legal entity identification system.”
The idea is to remove what GLEIF CEO Alexandre Kech describes in a recent article as a regulatory wall. “Currently, when a company in one country wants to pay, contract with, or onboard a company in another, it hits a wall of friction,” Kech writes. “Business registration data sits in national silos, in different languages and formats. No single, trustworthy way exists to confirm that a counterparty is real, legitimate, and genuinely represented by the people acting on its behalf.”
These regulatory barriers have consequences, says Kech, slowing trade, raising the cost of cross-border payments, creating openings for fraud and money laundering, and shutting out smaller organizations that can’t easily handle the administrative burden. “As more commerce moves online, the gap grows, and the need becomes more urgent: only verifiable organizations can participate fully in global markets.”
Project Aperta prototype with BIS demonstrates model in practice
As a proof of concept for interoperable business identity, GLEIF’s collaboration with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) on Project Aperta illustrates how LEIs could reduce repeated identity checks and support cross-border financial services. Developed and run by BIS Innovation Hub Hong Kong Centre, it trialled an interoperability layer connecting existing open finance networks in the UK, United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Hong Kong and India.
This so-called ‘network of networks’ demonstrates how a combination of open finance data, payments frameworks, and the Global LEI System can simplify AML and KYC or KYB compliance, based on a common identity layer.
Agentic economy demands clear chain of trust
All of GLEIF’s arguments about the need to rethink organizational identity as shared infrastructure applied before AI agents took the stage; now, they have added urgency, as agentic AI’s infiltration of commerce makes the question of delegated authority central to functioning digital ecosystems. In any sustainable agentic economy, agentic actions must have accountability attached.
Says Kech in a GLEIF release, “any web of domestic networks that seeks to make legal entity data portable across borders needs a globally standardized system of verified organizational identity. The Global LEI System serves this purpose precisely: it helps infrastructure, businesses, and entities make verified business data as widely available as possible, globally.”
Speaking recently on the Biometric Update Podcast about digital finance for AI-driven economies and the role of the vLEI, Kech says that for agents, accountability, control and mandate must be clear – and defined against recognized standards. “The vLEI can bring that chain of trust between an entity, an individual who is accountable for an AI agent, an AI agent who is performing tasks within a specific mandate, all through chained credentials.”
Interoperability is the point
The meaning of infrastructure is changing, and its digitization, Kech argues, should not be taken as a natural evolution, but a concentrated and coordinated effort to improve how data, money and trade move across virtual and regulatory borders, anchored by a deep and established root of trust.
Digital public infrastructure, he writes, “is most powerful when its building blocks connect: a payment system is more valuable when it can identify who is being paid, and an identity scheme when it recognizes identities beyond its own borders.”
“Interoperability is not a feature added at the end; it is the whole point.”
Article Topics
cross border identity verification | digital company ID | digital public infrastructure | GLEIF | Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) | verifiable credentials
