Organizational Identity Is the Layer Global Trade Has Been Missing

Digital trade will not be realized by digitizing paper documents alone. The greater challenge lies in enabling trusted data to move across platforms, borders, and counterparties without being re-verified at every step. That is an organizational identity problem, and solving it is where the next phase of trade digitalization will be decided.

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In the bid to unlock an estimated $30-40 billion in global trade growth and reduce the trade finance gap by up to 50%, significant time and resources are being poured into replacing paper trade documents with digital ones.

But paperless is not the same as digital. Replacing a paper bill of lading with a PDF does not actually digitalize a process if someone must then manually rekey that data into the next system or rerun due diligence on a counterparty that another platform has already verified.

This means that scalable digital trade will not be realized by digitizing more documents. Rather, trusted data must move seamlessly across organizations, platforms, and jurisdictions. As outlined in a report from the ICC Digital Standards Initiative (DSI), this requires an interoperability layer comprising globally recognized standards, protocols, and identifiers.

Key to this interoperability layer is portable, verifiable organizational identity, which is to digital trade what container shipping was to physical trade. The container did not make ships faster. It standardized what moved between them, so a box could pass from truck to crane to vessel to customs without being unpacked and re-inspected at every handover. Trusted organizational identity does the same for data, enabling it to move across platforms and borders and allowing users to act on it directly without repeating checks.

Why interoperable organizational identity has been the missing piece

The need for globally standardized organizational identifiers stems from the fact that most identity schemes were built for domestic or closed systems. National IDs, electronic IDs, and platform-specific credentials work well within their own environments but are not easily recognized across borders or platforms without bespoke bilateral arrangements. Every time two parties who have never transacted have to establish trust from scratch, the friction returns.

Consider a single shipment financed by a letter of credit. The electronic bill of lading passes through a carrier, a freight forwarder, a customs authority, the exporter’s bank, and the importer’s bank. Today, each party tends to reestablish who the other is on its own terms. The importer’s bank checks the exporter. The carrier’s platform verifies the freight forwarder. Customs validates the documentation against its own records. The same organizations are identified and re-identified at nearly every handover, because each system trusts only what it has checked itself. Every one of those checks is a place where the transaction can stall.

As trade becomes more data-driven, trust can no longer sit outside the transaction and must travel with the data. This is why the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and the verifiable LEI (vLEI) are increasingly being seen as foundational infrastructure. The LEI is a globally recognized identifier for the legal entity behind a transaction, already embedded in regulatory reporting across more than 100 jurisdictions, making it a common reference point for institutions in different countries. The vLEI extends this into digital interactions, enabling counterparties to computationally verify the identity, authority, and role of the people acting on behalf of an organization, while providing a foundation for emerging use cases such as AI agents.

Let's now revisit the earlier scenario and equip each organization with a verifiable identity that travels with the data. The freight forwarder does not need to re-establish the issuing bank's identity because the bank’s identity and the authority of the person or agent who signed on its behalf can be verified directly against a common root of trust. The data stays at its source. All other authorized parties can then access and verify it in place rather than rekeying it or repeating the diligence behind it. The result is fewer manual checks, fewer reconciliations, and faster release of both goods and financing.

Trust is what turns digitization into automation

The reason organizational identity is so powerful is that it provides the underlying trust that bridges digitization and automation, where the actual benefits of digital trade lie. Structured data tells a system what is happening. Identity tells it who is acting and whether that action can be trusted.

Without trusted identity, every process still needs manual intervention, validation, and reconciliation. With it, systems can act with far more confidence. For instance, the faster an incoming instruction can be trusted, the faster liquidity is unlocked and working capital becomes more efficient. Conversely, an instruction whose source cannot be verified has to be checked by hand, and the delay cascades. This is the same logic that has long governed trusted messaging in payments, now applied to trade.

This presents an immediate, practical takeaway for anyone running trade operations at a bank or a platform. The first question worth asking is where, in existing flows, the same organizations are re-verified after they have already been onboarded, and what it would take to consume a verifiable identity instead of repeating that work. For firms that already hold an LEI, the question is whether it is being used for more than regulatory reporting. The standards are evolving, and the advantage will go to participants ready to consume portable identity when their counterparties begin presenting it.

Why increasing coordination is the key to unlocking global digital trade
Given that the tools exist and the economic incentives are compelling, the obvious question is why portable identity is not already standard across global trade ecosystems. This was the starting point for the ICC Digital Standards Initiative (DSI) paper, which outlined a roadmap for interoperability and trust across the trade ecosystem and identified uneven progress and priorities among different parties as a key limiting factor.

There are various reasons for this lack of alignment. Some platforms remain closed and treat interoperability as a competitive threat rather than something to embrace, because their advantage today comes from holding participants inside their own walls. There is also genuine – and understandable – apprehension about moving trust across networks, as relying on a verification someone else performed requires high confidence in how it was done. Finally, many micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), particularly in emerging markets, lack the resources to invest in new infrastructure, unlike large corporates that can absorb the complexity.

All these problems are eminently solvable through more coordinated execution. There are clear roadmaps to help align policymakers and practitioners, make trust reusable rather than having to be recreated, and lower the cost of participation for the smallest players. For example, GLEIF's work to make organizational identity more accessible at the MSME level directly addresses this final challenge.

Understanding the need for trusted organizational identity for global trade

“Digital trade does not scale through digitization alone. It only scales when trust, data, and value can move across networks as seamlessly as goods move across borders.” This was the main takeaway of my latest Trust Talks conversation with Avanee Gokhale, Head of Industry Insights and Global Head of Trade at Swift and Vice Chair of the ICC Digital Standards Initiative (DSI) Industry Advisory Board.

We discussed why interoperability, rather than digitization, is the real challenge; how a verify-once, use-many model lets trust be reused across the ecosystem; what genuinely stands in the way; and why portable organizational identity is the layer that makes data-driven trade possible.

Listen to the full Trust Talks conversation with Avanee Gokhale for a closer look at how identity moves through a real trade transaction, what a network of networks demands of identity infrastructure, and what Know Your Agent will mean as AI enters commerce. Trust Talks is available across YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts: linktr.ee/TrustTalks.

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