Expanding the Global LEI System: Why Asia-Pacific is Key to a Trusted Digital Future
An open and transparent global digital marketplace will be built on interoperable, verifiable organizational identity. In this blog, Alexandre Kech, CEO at GLEIF, explores why the ongoing expansion of the Global LEI System across Asia-Pacific – coupled with a commitment to collaboration and excellence– is essential to fostering trust, enabling innovation, and driving inclusive transformation worldwide.
Author: Alexandre Kech
Date: 2025-10-31
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Building a more open and transparent digital economy cannot be achieved by a single organization. It will take sustained, meaningful collaboration from a diverse range of stakeholders who share the common objective of increasing cross-border trust in global markets.
Enter the Global LEI System (GLEIS) Forum – GLEIF's flagship annual gathering – providing a unique opportunity for regulators, Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and verifiable LEI (vLEI) issuers, financial institutions, technology providers, and market participants to engage and exchange on the evolving role of the LEI and vLEI.
This year's Forum took place in Sydney, Australia – marking the first time it has been hosted in Asia-Pacific and underscoring the region's integral role in driving the digitalization of the global economy. Indeed, a report from the World Economic Forum highlighted "that many Asian countries count as world leaders in innovation […]. Across the continent, innovation is seen as a strategic lever to unlock economic growth, accelerate transitions, and shape new markets."
The importance of Asia-Pacific to the Global LEI System was underscored this week by GLEIF’s announcement of a new representative office in China’s Shanghai Lin-gang Special Area. This strategic expansion aims to support growing demand for the LEI and vLEI across Greater China, and follows office openings in Mumbai in 2024, Singapore in 2023, and Tokyo in 2021.
Looking ahead, GLEIF is committed to increasing engagement and collaboration with stakeholders across Asia-Pacific to unlock new opportunities for organizations to participate in the global economy.
Increasing transparency in cross-border payments and trade
Discussions at the Forum highlighted significant regional momentum for both the LEI and the vLEI in promoting trust, transparency, and interoperability across payments, trade, and digital identity systems.
A key development driving adoption and innovation is the Financial Action Task Force's (FATF) updated Recommendation 16, which enhances payment transparency and, for the first time, references the LEI as a key identifier for legal persons in domestic and cross-border transactions.
The integration of the LEI into payment messaging standards and infrastructures will ensure that every legal entity involved in a transaction can be accurately and unambiguously identified – regardless of jurisdiction, language, or regulatory framework. This will help financial institutions meet their Recommendation 16 obligations while also streamlining compliance processes, reducing false positives, and improving sanctions screening and transaction monitoring.
Yet one of the key takeaways was that these implications extend far beyond payments, signaling that trusted organizational identity is becoming a cornerstone of transparency across all forms of cross-border transactions and interactions.
A discussion of the growing momentum behind the vLEI in digital trade and commerce revealed the scale of the opportunity ahead. By equipping any organization, regardless of size, with a trusted, standardized digital identity that can be accepted anywhere, the vLEI addresses the trust deficits and fragmentation that have inhibited the realization of truly global commerce. And as adoption and applications expand, a more interoperable and inclusive digital trade ecosystem is in sight – with the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) UK predicting that digital trade will deliver a $1 trillion economic dividend across Asia-Pacific.
Celebrating success across the Global LEI System
With a raft of global and national policies and regulations now emphasizing greater openness, accountability, and transparency, the contributions of LEI-issuing organizations in ensuring that the data underpinning the Global LEI System is accurate, up-to-date, and reliable are brought into even sharper focus.
To recognize the extensive efforts of LEI issuers in strengthening and expanding the Global LEI System, GLEIF launched the LOU Awards in 2023. The awards have since become a highlight of the GLEIS Forum, with the 2025 winners announced as:
Best-Performing LEI Issuer in the Large-Cap Category (more than 100,000 LEIs under management) - NordLEI
Best-Performing LEI Issuer in the Mid-Cap Category (between 5,000 and 100,000 LEIs under management) - GS1 AISBL
Best-Performing LEI Issuer in the Small-Cap Category (less than 5,000 LEIs under management) - Saudi Credit Bureau / Moa’rif
“Data quality is at the heart of everything we do; it drives trust, transparency, and integrity across the global financial system. We’ll continue striving for the highest standards and a more transparent LEI ecosystem.”
Anders Åström, CEO, NordLEI
“It is fair to assert that the LEI has become the benchmark for identifying legal entities across the financial industry.”
“Data quality isn’t just a task – it’s a mission and a mindset”.
Abdullah Almesher, Chief Product & Data Officer
Looking to 2026, GLEIF will continue to strengthen collaboration across Asia-Pacific and beyond – deepening relationships with regulators, market participants, and digital identity innovators. As the Global LEI System and the vLEI ecosystem expand in scope and adoption, the collective goal remains clear: to deliver trusted, verifiable organizational identity as a foundation for secure, inclusive, and interoperable global commerce.
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Alexandre Kech is the CEO of the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF).
Prior to joining GLEIF, Alexandre Kech was Head of Digital Securities at the SIX Digital Exchange. As a member of the Executive Board, Alex had full executive responsibility for the Digital Securities business vertical, including sales and relationship management, product development, business design, and ecosystem expansion.
Over the past 25 years, Alex has constructed a unique career combining finance at BNY Mellon, payments/securities infrastructure and standards at SWIFT, and blockchain and digital assets at Onchain Custodian (ONC) and, most recently, Citi Ventures. As co-founder and CEO of ONC, Alex led the Singapore and Shanghai-based team that built custody and prime brokerage services for crypto and other digital assets from scratch. As Blockchain & Digital Asset director at Citi Ventures, he built a team to engage the European ecosystem on emerging use cases for blockchain technologies and digital assets.
Alex is also involved in industry and standardization initiatives. As the convenor of the ISO TC 68 / SC8 / WG3, which produced the ISO 24165 Digital Token Identifier (DTI), he is a member of the DTI Foundation Product Advisory Committee. He also recently served as co-chair of the Global Digital Finance (gdf.io) custody working group.
Alex earned a bachelor’s degree in translation and an Executive MBA from the Quantic School of Business and Technology while building Onchain Custodian, putting theory into practice in real-time.
