GLEIF to help increase global visibility of Chinese companies

The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) has a new Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) mapping initiative to increase the global visibility of Chinese businesses.

GLEIF is collaborating with Qichacha (QCC), a Chinese business information platform, to boost the visibility and discoverability of Chinese companies internationally. Certified mapping means Chinese businesses listed on QCC’s platform will have greater identifiability and discoverability beyond China’s borders.

“We are focused on making the LEI a truly global standard by linking it to identification schemes across jurisdictions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America,” says Alexandre Kech, CEO at GLEIF.

“Certified mapping between the LEI and the QCC Code reflects this ambition and supports users of QCC products to move from national and regional identification schemes to a global identifier that is used extensively in financial services and trade globally.”

QCC was included in GLEIF’s Vendor and Services Providers Relationship Group in February 2024 while the new initiative creates a certified link between the LEI and QCC Code, with GLEIF to publish open-source relationship files (in CSV format), mapping both identifiers, monthly.

In a podcast interview, Kech said that LEIs are issued everywhere (with the exception of North Korea) and that GLEIF intends to expand to SMEs and “other, smaller companies.” He also clarified that GLEIF publishes LEIs and works with a network of LEI issuers, one of which is Bloomberg. The full podcast is available here.

GLEIF in November 2024 approved Shanghai-based BOCOM Fintech to adopt LEI, with the Chinese company advocating for LEI as an international passport for legal entities from its strategic position in Shanghai’s pilot free trade zone. The LEI is a 20-character, alpha-numeric code based on the ISO 17442 standard developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), while vLEI is the digital counterpart.

GLEIF begins deployment of Verifiable Legal Entity Identifier system

The Verifiable Legal Entity Identifier (vLEI) is GLEIF’s effort to establish a cryptographically verifiable credentialing system aimed at extending identity assurance beyond individuals and to organizations. In effect it is giving organizations digital IDs.

GLEIF has begun its deployment phase for vLEI with live implementations due to start later this year. The vLEI adds an additional layer to the LEI system, which was designed to overcome limitations in the identification of financial entities following the 2008 financial crisis. To date, more than 2.8 million LEIs have been issued worldwide, which covers an estimated 80 percent of global trade value. Now, the vLEI will allow legal entities to issue and revoke credentials to individuals and systems acting on their behalf.

“This is the only system that does that in the world,” said Kech, as reported by idtechwire. “There is no other verifiable credential system that enables that cryptographic link between an individual acting on behalf of a company and the company.”

vLEI is a flexible protocol that can be integrated into Web2 or Web3 systems and could be used for secure communications, authentication, and identity verification across decentralized blockchain networks. GLEIF is in the process of expanding its network of vLEI issuers, with recent entrants being Hong Kong’s Certizen Technology and Thailand’s Finema.

Providing digital ID for businesses could save British businesses billions in efficiency, lost revenue and fraud every year, according to analysis by the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT). In January, GLEIF also worked with the UK business registry Companies House to improve the discoverability of UK businesses.

Article Topics

China  |  digital company ID  |  digital identity  |  GLEIF  |  KYB  |  KYC  |  Legal Entity Identifier (LEI)