Trusted Organizational Identity as the Common Layer for Digital Markets

Digital financial markets will only scale if their standards connect. In this blog, Alexandre Kech, GLEIF CEO, explores how trusted organizational identity, underpinned by the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and the verifiable LEI (vLEI), can strengthen trust, transparency, and efficiency across the financial ecosystem. By drawing on recent industry initiatives and recommendations from the International Capital Market Association (ICMA), the International Securities Services Association (ISSA), and others, Alexandre highlights the importance of consistent identification and digital trust across primary and post-trade markets.

---

---

As financial markets continue to innovate and move beyond experimentation with technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), distributed ledger technology (DLT), and tokenization, the challenge now lies in ensuring they can operate safely and efficiently across established and emerging market infrastructures.

This is no easy task. New technologies can make individual processes faster while still leaving markets fragmented. Different platforms can use different data models. Digital assets can sit on infrastructures that do not connect. Organizations can be identified differently from one workflow to another. Automation can move information faster without necessarily making it more trustworthy.

ICMA’s latest NextGen report – Executing today, imagining the future – explores how these challenges can be solved. By examining how data, standards, and market infrastructure can connect so that digital transformation can scale, ICMA describes an evolutionary approach centered on better data, stronger interoperability, workflow modernization, and coordinated industry action.

Key to this approach is the ability of organizations everywhere to establish trusted identity across automated, interconnected, and cross-border digital ecosystems. This reflects a broader shift, with organizational identity and interoperability rapidly becoming core components of the digital economy. Recent research by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that digital identities are available in 24 of the 33 countries assessed (73%), while interoperability frameworks have been adopted by 29 of 33 OECD countries (88%).

Interoperability Depends on Connected Standards

ICMA’s NextGen report sets out a path toward more connected, data-driven primary markets, moving from document-led and manually coordinated workflows toward data-led processes with automated, auditable controls and greater interoperability. Its research also points to coordination, incentives, and operating changes as important considerations alongside technology itself.

The report has particular significance for organizational identity and the role of the LEI and vLEI in enabling digital financial markets. The LEI provides a globally standardized means of identifying legal entities. The vLEI extends verified organizational identity into the digital domain, enabling counterparties to computationally verify the identity, authority, and role of a person acting on behalf of a legal entity. As transactions and workflows become increasingly automated, systems need to establish both which organization they are interacting with and whether the person acting for that organization is authorized to do so.

Importantly, the report places the LEI and vLEI within a connected architecture alongside ICMA's Bond Data Taxonomy (BDT) and the Common Domain Model (CDM), as well as messaging standards such as ISO 20022 and a host of other identifiers like the International Securities Identification Number (ISIN), Digital Token Identifier (DTI), and Unique Transaction Identifier (UTI). This highlights a clear principle that standards must connect so that data captured at source can support automation, interoperability, settlement readiness, and lifecycle processing across systems.

This principle becomes particularly important as traditional, hybrid, and digital market models coexist. For instance, a digital bond that does not connect to investor systems, custody arrangements, payment rails, applicable legal frameworks, liquidity channels, and reporting obligations remains difficult to scale.

Future market infrastructure therefore needs to connect with the wider architecture around it. ICMA’s work on the BDT illustrates this approach. The BDT is designed to support greater standardization and interoperability across bond-market processes, and ICMA has also worked to connect it with ISO 20022. Organizational identity is one of the elements that must remain consistent across these environments.

From Entity Identification to Verifiable Authority

More specifically, ICMA’s report identifies investor identification as a recurring primary market workflow issue. In fact, it highlights that the European Central Bank’s (ECB) Debt Issuance Market Contact Group (DIMCG) has already invited issuers, agents, deal managers and investors to agree on a common, open scheme building on the LEI for identifying investors in primary market transactions.

The issue becomes broader in future digital workflows and again illustrates why organizational identity is becoming increasingly relevant to the operational infrastructure of digital financial markets. Account structures, omnibus models, wallets, ultimate beneficial owner traceability, Know Your Customer (KYC) processes and role-based permissions all need to be considered.

ICMA’s view on the need for consistent legal entity identification is complemented by ISSA from a post-trade perspective, whose November 2025 Digital Identity and Onboarding Solutions paper recommends that the LEI should be a requirement throughout financial markets for enabling consistent client identification both within custodians and between custodians and central securities depositories (CSDs). Together with ICMA’s analysis, this reflects the need for consistent legal entity identification from primary issuance through securities servicing.

ISSA’s paper also considers various LEI and vLEI use cases to reduce repeated onboarding checks. These include account holders using the vLEI to share identity information with eligible asset servicers, with the best option for integration described as using the LEI and/or vLEI “as a permission engine or key” to a portfolio of account-holder information. This could give authorized securities services providers access to KYC-related data and documents, with visibility of changes and renewals, while the account holder retains control of its information.

For financial institutions and businesses, this points to how broader use of the LEI can support customer onboarding, customer due diligence, KYC, and anti-money laundering processes. Trusted organizational identity can also reduce friction where the same organization needs to be identified and verified across multiple systems and counterparties.

The operational benefits extend beyond regulatory reporting and into emerging digital financial workflows across capital markets, securities services, corporate treasury and digital trade. In addition to ICMA and ISSA, bodies such as the European Association of Corporate Treasurers (EACT) and the International Chamber of Commerce Digital Standards Initiative (ICC DSI) are focusing on trusted organizational identity, interoperable standards, machine-readable data and verifiable digital credentials.

For example, EACT has pointed to the importance of a single identity for corporates in the digital era and the potential for broader LEI adoption to support onboarding, fraud reduction and operational efficiency. ICC DSI, meanwhile, focuses on the legal and technical foundations needed for digital trade to scale across borders.

Whether modernizing capital markets, improving treasury operations or digitizing trade, organizations need to establish trust consistently as they move between markets, platforms and jurisdictions. Trusted organizational identity can provide a common foundation for connecting organizations and the people acting on their behalf across these digital workflows.

AI Raises the Bar for Trust

ICMA also sees opportunities for AI to extract, validate, reconcile, and route data across workflows, reducing manual work and supporting exception management. At the same time, AI cannot substitute for trusted data, standards, and human accountability. The emergence of agentic payments makes the identity and authority question even more immediate.

In August 2026, the Payment & Clearing Association of China (PCAC) issued a self-regulatory convention for agentic payment applications. Building on existing KYC requirements, it calls on member institutions to explore “Know Your Agent” (KYA) mechanisms that identify and verify agents connected to the payment chain and establish the relationship between the agent and the user. It also addresses the need to define authorization boundaries and manage the information and permissions associated with agents participating in payment processes.

As software agents gain the ability to interact with services and initiate or execute payment instructions on behalf of users, these requirements raise a wider question for digital transactions: how can a system establish what an agent is, who it acts for, and what it is authorized to do?

At the organizational level, a payment instruction, transaction, or digital interaction may involve an organization, a person acting for that organization and, increasingly, software operating within delegated authority. Trust therefore depends on connecting identity with authority across these layers.

This is where verifiable organizational identity becomes particularly relevant. Tokenization changes how assets can be represented and transferred but does not establish the identity of the organizations participating. DLT provides new infrastructure models but does not by itself establish organizational authority.

As digital interactions become more automated, trust increasingly needs to be machine-verifiable. The LEI and vLEI together provide a way to link a globally standardized organizational identity with digitally verifiable authority in a form designed to operate independently of any individual platform.

Trusted Organizational Identity as a Common Layer

Different standards play different but complementary roles in financial markets. Identifiers and messaging standards such as ISIN, the LEI, and ISO 20022 support recognition, routing, and information exchange across systems. Data models and taxonomies support consistent interpretation and processing. Digital infrastructures provide new ways to execute and record transactions.

Yet we have seen that the true value comes when these different standards are connected. From primary issuance through to post-trade, industry bodies including ICMA and ISSA are pointing to the need for the consistent identification of organizations as workflows become more automated.

Across various environments and scenarios, organizations need a reliable way to establish who they are and who is authorized to act on their behalf. This is where the Global LEI System and the vLEI have a foundational role to play. By enabling organizations to establish trusted identity and authority across markets, platforms, and jurisdictions, they can provide a common organizational identity layer for more connected and interoperable digital markets and, ultimately, a more trusted global digital economy.

---