The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) has announced the publicly available trials of a new suite of organisational identity services leveraging its new verifiable LEI (vLEI) model of digital identity.
This inaugural suite of services, comprising credential and key management, digital signing, and verification, are provided by what is claimed to be the newly Qualified vLEI Issuer, Provenant. It’s now being offered for proof-of-concept (POC) trials to key stakeholder organisations in the business telecoms ecosystem.
The goal of these services is to help the telco industry overcome a variety of corporate identity-related challenges that currently permit, for example, nuisance or fraudulent cold calls, robocalls and robotexts. By adopting the vLEI, enterprise organisations that engage in outbound calling and text messaging can provide recipient customers and prospects with digitised proof that both their organisation and the communication itself are authentic, having been digitally signed with trusted vLEI credentials designed and governed by GLEIF.
The vLEI is a digitally secure attestation of an organisation’s Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), a globally established, standardised and regulatory endorsed system of legal entity identification. vLEI credentials can be issued to any LEI-holding organisation. The vLEI expands the utility of the LEI for the digital age by enabling LEI-holding organisations to verify their authenticity instantly and automatically in a zero-trust environment.
Provenant plans to issue vLEI credentials to a number of stakeholders on a POC trial basis in Q1 2023 and welcomes engagement from interested parties. Relevant stakeholders include: legal entities who use originating service providers to place their calls and text messages on the network for delivery; originating service providers who provide a network on-ramp for a legal entity’s communications; intermediary service providers that route call and text message traffic; and terminating service providers who receive these communications and deliver them to their customers.
“Numerous entities, from the enterprises that originate communications to the service providers that deliver them, can benefit from using vLEIs,” comments Randy Warshaw, CEO at Provenant. “For too long, the telecoms industry has struggled to identify the originators of nuisance or fraudulent calls, as well as automated robocalls and robotexts. As a consequence, calls and messages from legitimate enterprises are going unanswered. The vLEI makes the provenance of these bona fide communications verifiable back to the enterprise that originates them. It’s an elegant, digitally trustworthy solution to a problem that has dogged the field of business communications for decades.”
“As more Qualified vLEI Issuers come on board, we will see a range of industry-specific use cases and services starting to emerge for this new, universal form of digital organisational identity,” adds Stephan Wolf, CEO, GLEIF. “The vLEI is an open, commercially neutral, and global solution to the issues of security, convenience and ease-of-use that are challenging the field of digital organisational identity. In time, we expect the vLEI to revolutionise secure identity management across the internet, safeguarding transactions and interactions for businesses in every industry.”
Over two million legal entities around the world already identify themselves internationally using an LEI, a global business identity system backed and overseen by the G20, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), and a group of worldwide public authorities. To encourage broader LEI adoption by legal entities everywhere, GLEIF, the official guardian of the Global LEI System, has moved quickly to extend its ecosystem to offer the vLEI, a digitally trustworthy counterpart to the LEI, which allows automated entity verification without the need for human intervention.
The vLEI interoperates seamlessly and securely with all technology models around the world and leverages the Global LEI System, which is the only open, standardised, and regulatory-endorsed legal entity identification system. The vLEI is a digitally secure attestation of an organisation’s Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), a globally established, standardised and regulatory endorsed system of legal entity identification. vLEI credentials can be issued to any LEI-holding organisation. The vLEI expands the utility of the LEI for the digital age by enabling LEI-holding organisations to verify their authenticity instantly and automatically in a zero-trust environment, made possible through verifiable credentials and KERI key management.