Beyond Digitization: The Trusted Identity Imperative for Global Trade

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As global trade moves from paper to fully digital ecosystems, the harder problem is no longer digitization. It is interoperability and trust at scale. In this episode of Trust Talks, GLEIF CEO Alexandre Kech is joined by Avanee Gokhale, Head of Industry Insights and Global Head of Trade at Swift and Vice Chair of the ICC Digital Standards Initiative Industry Advisory Board, to examine why fragmented systems, inconsistent standards adoption, and weak identity frameworks continue to slow progress.

Drawing on the ICC DSI roadmap, Avanee explains why digitizing a document is not the same as digitizing a process, and why trade only scales when data is machine-readable, verifiable, and reusable across organizations, platforms, and jurisdictions. The conversation centers on portable trust: the idea that if one party has already verified an organization, that trust should be reusable across the ecosystem rather than recreated at every step.

Alexandre and Avanee discuss why identity is the bottleneck, how the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and verifiable LEI (vLEI) are becoming foundational infrastructure rather than a regulatory checkbox, and what the shift toward agentic AI means for "know your agent." They also cover Swift's work on standards and a shared ledger, the move toward a network of networks, and how to align public- and private-sector incentives.

The one thing to remember: digital trade does not scale through digitization alone. It scales when trust, data, and value move across networks as seamlessly as goods move across borders.

Listen now: linktr.ee/TrustTalks