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The Connector Podcast - From LEI To vLEI: How Companies Prove Who They Are Across Borders
What if your systems could instantly verify not just a company’s identity, but that a specific person or agent is truly authorized to act for it? We sit down with Alexandre Kech, CEO at GLEIF, to unpack how the Legal Entity Identifier became the world’s backbone for business identity and how the new Verifiable LEI brings authority, delegation, and digital trust into the open—across web, apps, and cross‑border workflows.
We trace the journey from post‑2008 regulatory gaps to a global, regulator‑overseen public good that maps who is who and who owns whom. Alex explains how vLEI upgrades identity by binding official organizational roles—directors, UBOs, CFOs, even AI agents—to a company through cryptographic, verifiable credentials. That means cleaner onboarding, true single sign‑on for enterprises, role‑based digital signatures that stand up to audit, and safer integrations with suppliers, banks, and platforms. We explore the trust architecture end‑to‑end: the root of trust, accreditation of Qualified vLEI Issuers, and how companies can extend credentials internally to staff and systems.
Asia-Pacific’s momentum takes center stage, with rapid growth in LEI issuance, a critical mass of QVIs, and forward‑leaning pilots. Hear how fragmented jurisdictions and busy trade corridors turn vLEI into an interoperability layer for payments, trade, and compliance.
If this conversation helps you see identity and authority in a new light, follow and share the show with a colleague who cares about payments, compliance, or digital trust. Subscribe for more deep dives, and leave a review to tell us where you want vLEI adopted next.
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Koen Vanderhoydonk
koen.vanderhoydonk@jointheconnector.com
#FinTech #RegTech #Scaleup #WealthTech
Welcome to the Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintech, fans, and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen Vanderhoydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the market.
Speaker 1:Welcome everybody today from Cyberport in Hong Kong for another podcast with The Connector. and have a special guest, Alex from GLEIF. Alex, can you introduce yourself and can you also explain what Glive does?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, thank you for having us. Alexandre Kesh from uh CEO of GLEIF, uh, background in banking, infrastructure, and digital asset and digital identity. So bank of New York Citibank on the banking side, Swift uh for many years uh on the infrastructure side, and uh crypto and digital assets uh thereafter. You you did it all. I did it all, exactly. It's a nice CV for what we're doing uh because GLEIF uh is specialized in identification of legal entities. So it was created after the 2008 crisis, uh realization by the regulators and the banks that they didn't have a clue of the exposure they had, the risk they had towards their counterparts, because those counterparts were identified at national level with a national identity, and there was no global identity system for legal entities. So GLEIF was created by the Financial Stability Board, which is a creation of the G20 after the financial crisis, to set up a system enabling anybody to know in the world who is who as a legal entity and who owns who as well, which is quite important. So the hierarchy of ownership behind a legal entity. So the system has been live for 10 years now, more than 10 years. It initially started in capital markets and OTC derivative uh use case, counterparty identification, regulatory reporting, and it's now moving to other fields such as cross-border payments with FATF recommendations, so uh uh rules to prevent money laundering and uh financing of terrorism cross-border. And I therefore you need identification of companies, and also more and more into the fintech world and technology world, uh, with uh the creation of the verifiable legal entity identifier, which enables an entity to prove who they are on web two, web three on any platforms, but also people acting on behalf of that company or system acting on behalf of that company to prove that they are legit in uh behaving or acting or signing on behalf of that company.
Speaker 1:And the verifiable lay, that's the fee lay, and that's the new kit on the block. So what is it actually solving for companies?
Speaker 2:It solves multiple things. Uh the number of use cases we've seen and uh we here in Hong Kong for a VLAI hackathon where we had so many uh use case suggestions is is really broad, but in a nutshell, in enable uh verifiability of who is in front of you on a digital platform. So here we're talking to one another, I see you, I see you see me, you can I can it's easy to I can pinch your arm. Exactly. I can show you my ID card, my my business card, and you will know who I am. On digital platform, you don't have that. So verifiability of uh who is on the other side uh when you're dealing with someone on digital platform or a company on digital platform, permissioning, so giving access to that entity into systems, for example, uh a single sign-on for companies into various platforms that enables that, and also uh permissioning, of course, so um so authentication, permissioning and signing as well, digital signatures uh on contract, with the difference that with current methods of digital signatures, uh leveraging digital certificates, for example, you end up with one people, one person signing on its behalf, but not one person signing on its behalf as a delegated authority or as a CEO of a company. Uh what vLEI enables in that use case is to cryptographically bind an individual acting on behalf of the company with the company in a verifiable way, which is revolutionary. That's the only infrastructure that does that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so automatically you create also a virtual registry of all the UBOs, the ultimate benefit for orals.
Speaker 2:You could do that, yeah. Absolutely. So that's called an official organizational role in our world of VIDI credentials. So an entity can effectively assign an OOR uh after verification by a third party, like in the real world uh notary, in our case it's a qualified VIDI, sure. So they can issue official organizational role credentials to their directors, to their UBOs, to their COs, CFOs, etc. And then these can prove to anybody that they are effectively uh the acting person for that company.
Speaker 1:Because that would have been my next question. If if that's a system, um glife is not the one that's issuing. That's that that's then the qualified V VI, the QVI.
Speaker 2:Exactly. So we are the root of trust. So the root of trust is in a in a cryptographic system, is where everything goes back to for for uh guaranteeing the trust of the system. And glife, as I mentioned, uh has been created by regulators and is overseen by regulators today, so it's a strong root of trust. Then we accredit qualified VLDI issuers, we qualify qualified vLei issuers who are then responsible for verifying the identity of not only the legal entities, but the people acting on behalf of that legal entity, official organizational role, and issue credentials to them. And then the entity, and that's important, autonomously can start issuing other credentials, credentials to their staff to access the building, to log in onto a system, to sign on behalf of the company, credentials to systems, um, a computer, an AI agent, to prove that that computer or AI agent is being is is controlled by that legal entity and is authorized to do stuff from that legal entity.
Speaker 1:So it has a very strong ripple effect, if you want. Um I saw that recently you opened an office in China. So what does APEC mean for you and and what's what's it on what's happening?
Speaker 2:So Asia has been uh a regional focus of us for the last uh probably five years, I would say, four or five years, very successfully. So the number of LEI is issuance in in Asia Pacific uh has grown significantly in the last uh years, in India, in China, in the rest of uh in Japan, etc. And um the the reason why we open an office in in China is because we need to anchor that presence a bit more than before, because China and the Greater Bay Area, more specifically Hong Kong, uh Macau and the uh almost the Belt and Road uh countries as well, is becoming more and more important to us because they are using ADI extensively. So um a few examples the uh the China interbanking uh payment system, uh SIPS is using LDI as a primary key for identifying legal entities. On the VADI side, uh we have uh now eight QVIs, qualified VADI issues globally. Uh six of them are in Asia, and actually four of them, if I'm not mistaken, are in the China area, so Hong Kong uh and China. So it demonstrates that there is a clear interest for the VADI system uh in this region. So we want to be present and support this a bit more.
Speaker 1:How do you compare the China region with, for example, Europe, America, other global places?
Speaker 2:So on the LEI side, so the legal entity identifier side, uh reference data set uh uh number usage and mandates, regulatory mandates, Europe is the highest user of the LEI system. The you the the the US comes second, although India is catching up uh in terms of usage as well. And then you have Asia that is uh clearly following uh following through. So how does it compare on the LEI side? They're still catching up, I would say, what has been initially initiated in Europe and in the US and are is being adopted uh in Asia Pacific. On the vLei side, so the verifiable financial part, they're way in advance to the rest of the world. Uh because they this region by almost DNA is uh more forward-looking, more dynamic than Europe and the US, uh, at least today. And and they're very interested in new technologies, they're very fragmented in terms of jurisdictions and technical infrastructure.
Speaker 1:So the benefit is high.
Speaker 2:Exactly. VLDI is that interoperability layer that they need to do more business among themselves, but also with the rest of the world.
Speaker 1:You recently ran a global uh hackathon to uh grasp IDs from the industry. What has been your finding on those on that hackathon?
Speaker 2:The uh I was mentioning that at the beginning, the number of use cases possible for VADI. It's uh we we're always amazed by the creativity of QVIs, qualified V ADI issuers, but also software providers and solution providers on how they can leverage the the capabilities of the V ADI, which uh we just described. And um, I would say that and the number of uh contestants. We had, I think, 110 in uh more than that, yes, contestants. Uh and uh very, very strong from uh large banks like uh Lloyd's Bank or large institutions like the Long Stock Exchange and Clearstream to uh smaller fintech, two people who want to ensure we want to get into it and see an opportunity, a business opportunity. Well, that's the beauty of a hackathon, isn't it? Absolutely, and so that that was the two, I would say, main uh uh surprises or at least uh learnings from uh from that first edition, because it's a first edition of the vLei hackathon.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and later, and also for the listeners, I would say stay tuned because the winners will be announced soon. If I would be a mid-sized company, how can I benefit from the VLA and how can I get started?
Speaker 2:So, first you need to get an LEI because that's the foundation of uh identity that is required for a vLei. And then you should probably look at what are your pain points as a company uh in terms of authentication of your customers or uh authentication of your suppliers or participating or bringing trust into your own company for uh others to use you as a provider of service, for example. And depending on that uh use case, develop uh with partners, technical partners, solutions to leverage the vLei to build that trust layer that you're missing in parts of your of your business. And um it this is a collaborative type of approach, right? You can't just use vLei on your own if nobody around you wants to use it. So get involved into industry groups that are talking about the use of LEI and VAEI, like the ICC DSI initiative in trade, like uh the payments market practice group in payments, etc. etc., and see how you can uh collectively benefit from a system of identification.
Speaker 1:Now, earlier you said that it's 10 years ago that uh delay numbers were introduced, and I remember because I was part of the market board in Belgium. Now, instead of looking back, looking forwards, how does success look like for you in 12 months?
Speaker 2:So, in 12 months, that's a bit short term for uh a global system, but uh we still uh look at that uh timeline. So on the LEI side is uh we start seeing an increase of usage of the LEI for cross-border payments and progressively in trade as well and trade and supply chain. But that's going to be progressive because uh these things take time to change, and you know how banks can be sometimes a bit slow, for example, to move. But the corporate and the corporate treasures of these worlds are pushing the banks to move on towards the AEI, so very confident there. On the VADI side, this year and last year has been about establishing the system, launching the system, piloting the system, and now we've been trying this year to build the ecosystem of software and service providers who supports the vLei credentials and can offer services around it and also QVI. The next year will be uh around real implementation, like scaling of the implementations of vLeis in various use cases. We have one that uh is likely to be quite successful and launched next year, which is around the securing of telecommunication companies, uh telecommunication um uh calls, sorry. So proving the origin of a call. I don't know about you, but I don't hang I don't answer my phone anymore because it's either a scammer or someone who wants to sell something. Check exactly, and and that's a major problem for telcos because uh their services are not used. It's a major problem for companies because they can't reach their customers by phone anymore. And there is a project uh run by the GSMA foundry to uh pilot the vLei DLEI to secure the transactions from origins to uh to receiving uh entity or receiving person in a way that you finally answer the phone.
Speaker 1:Also, exciting times ahead. Um maybe as a last comment on this podcast, if people want to get started with Glive, how do they find you? How do they contact you?
Speaker 2:So we obviously have a website, glive.org, um, where you have a lot of information about various use cases where you can find a database of legal entity identifiers for free. So all the data that we have about legal entities are available for free to anybody to use through APIs, through the file downloads, through uh lookup. So that's important also to mention. It's a non-for-profit foundation. We're not we are public goods, we're not there to sell commercially products. We're here to make data available for products to be built. That's important to mention. And then depending on what they the what role they want to play in the global LEI system, they could be want to become an LEI issuer or a qualified vLei issuer or simply a user, they can be put in contact with that network of partners we have around the world to uh to collaborate and work on solutions.
Speaker 1:Very clear. Alex, thank you very much for participating to this podcast. Thank you also to the listeners and stay tuned. More news will come soon. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Speaker:Thanks for listening to another episode of the Connector Podcast. To connect and keep up to date with all the latest, head over to www.jointheconnector.com or hit subscribe via your podcast streaming platform.