Rapid progress on the vLEI, including new governance framework
“For businesses the world over, confidence in digital authenticity is in short supply,” writes Stephan Wolf, CEO of the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF). “As businesses increasingly cooperate and transact remotely and across borders, the systems they use to establish trust also need to evolve.” There is therefore, GLEIF believes, an urgent unmet need for greater security, convenience, and ease-of-use in digital identity, including identity verification and proof of data authenticity.
In a substantial new post, plus accompanying video, Wolf discusses the rapid progress being made to address this issue with the development of the ‘verifiable LEI,’ or vLEI. This is intended as a standardised, digitised version of the existing LEI – Legal Entity Identifier – capable of enabling instant, automated trust between legal entities and their representatives. In a significant milestone earlier this month, GLEIF and the Trust Over IP Foundation published the vLEI Ecosystem Governance Framework, setting out an operational model and describing how vLEI-issuing stakeholders will perform their roles within a decentralised ecosystem.
We at XBRL International are longtime supporters of the LEI, and of its incorporation into reporting rules and XBRL taxonomies. Not only are such identifiers useful in transactions between businesses, but also for keeping track of reporting data over time and across jurisdictions. We strongly welcome the advent of the vLEI in making the LEI truly digital and easily, automatically verifiable.
“The vLEI has the potential to become one of the most valuable digital credentials in the world; it is designed to become the hallmark of authenticity for any legal entity, anywhere,” concludes Wolf. “It changes the game in digital organizational identity and will represent a sea change in digital trust that will benefit every country, company, and, ultimately, citizen in the world.”
Lofty ambitions perhaps, but in our view well worth supporting. The impact of a widespread vLEI on trade, on anti-money laundering, on corporate accountability, and on the expansion of trust would be tremendous.
