vLEI
The initiative behind vLEI
The Global LEI Foundation (GLEIF) is leading the way in implementing an entirely digitised LEI service to enable instant, global, automated identity verification. Having a cryptographically verifiable LEI would optimise processes and strengthen different sectors like healthcare, telecom, financial services and more.
Digital certificates (electronic documents issued by a Certificate Authority) haven’t completely solved the digital identity case. The information contained within is often outdated, and revocation has always been an issue. Furthermore, individual countries often have their own schema, meaning that a digital certificate issued in one country might not be usable by the owner in another country or context. The effect of this came to light during the 2008 global financial crisis. From this grew out the realisations that digital certificates do not facilitate the mission that is by GLEIF, which is to develop a verifiable credential and cryptographically secure chain of trust where each business worldwide should have only one global identity.
GLEIF is now inviting stakeholders from across the global economy to partake in a cross-industry development program to create an ecosystem and credential governance framework and the technical infrastructure for a verifiable LEI (vLEI) – a digitally verifiable credential containing the LEI. The vLEI will create a cryptographically secure chain that puts back the former manual processes required to access and confirm an entity’s LEI data.
“The global LEI system is unique in its capacity to provide regulated and standardised global identities for legal entities everywhere. Our next step is to secure the process of presenting and verifying LEI data digitally, so it can be used across the digital economy in corporate ID use-cases,” said GLEIF CEO Stephan Wolf.
Source: Regulation Asia
Who is it for?
vLEI will give legal entities, government organisations and organisations worldwide the ability to use non-repudiable identification data pertaining to their legal status, ownership structure and authorised representatives in their business activities.
The GLEIF architecture for the vLEI goes as far as enabling verifications of persons representing the entity and their roles in the organisation, satisfying the requirements for a Know Your Customer (KYC) process, onboarding, business transactions, and regulatory filings. Therefore brings the convenience of the LEIs to a broader audience by establishing trust in the identity of whom you’re dealing with whilst increasing efficiency and privacy.
The framework behind vLEI
Ubisecure and its partner network will begin issuing vLEI Verifiable Credentials as a part of their LEI product portfolio and assist organisations in using the vLEI by adding support to its CIAM and IDaaS solutions. The vLEI is a fully digitized LEI service capable of allowing automated identity verification between counterparties based on the W3C specification. With extensibility in mind, it supports any existing and future self-sovereign identity (SSI) platforms, whether blockchain/distributed ledger-based or otherwise.
So the relying parties and counterparties can consume the vLEI knowing that the information contained has previously been verified by an accredited LEI issuer, which makes it trustworthy. vLEI will only contain active LEI codes to provide up-to-date information.
Developed using the KERI (Key Event Receipt Infrastructure) protocol, The vLEI infrastructure will be a network-of-networks of real universality and transferability. Supporting the full range of blockchain, SSI and other decentralized key management platforms. vLEIs will be hostable on both ledgers and cloud infrastructure supporting both the decentralization of ledgers and the control and performance of cloud. Portability will enable GLEIF’s vLEI ecosystem to unify all ledger-based ecosystems that support the vLEI.
Who is Ubisecure?
Ubisecure is an accredited LEI issuer (otherwise known as a Legal Operating Unit or LOU). As of the 29th of March, they’ve announced support for the Global LEI Foundation’s (GLEIF) verifiable LEI, called vLEI. Being the number one Customer IAM (CIAM) provider in the Nordics and a leading provider of Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) solutions through Europe, Ubisecure’s goal has always been to make the complex identity and security challenges of organisations simpler when building applications.
Legal standards
vLEI complies with the W3C open standard Verifiable Credentials Data Model and Decentralized Identifier (DID) specification for cryptographically-verifiable identifiers that leverage distributed ledger technology, as well as Trust over IP (ToIP) standards.