The ISO 17442 Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) standard has been expanded to specify how LEIs can be embedded in digitally signed credentials. The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF), a Category A liaison to ISO/TC 68/SC 8, pioneered the idea of leveraging LEIs to identify organizations within these tamper-resistant and verifiable credentials known as verifiable LEIs, or vLEIs.
Part 3 of the LEI standard, published as ISO 17442-3:2024 - Financial services — Legal entity identifier (LEI) — Part 3: Verifiable LEIs (vLEIs), describes several types of vLEI credentials that were developed using the chaining capabilities of Authentic Chained Data Container credentials (ACDC credentials). This chaining, combined with the secure capabilities of the Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI ) protocol for the issuance and revocation of credentials and the pre-rotation of cryptographic keys, allows for the provenance of verifiable LEIs (vLEIs) to be traced back to GLEIF as the Root of Trust for the vLEI Trust Chain as well as to the organization’s LEI in the Global LEI System, which is operated by GLEIF under regulatory oversight.
Additional types of vLEI credentials, namely vLEI role credentials, extend the ability of vLEI credentials to verify the identity of people that represent an organization in either official or functional roles, both inside and outside the boundaries of that organization.
This addition to ISO 17442 expands the standard to enable LEIs to be used in both the recent innovation of credentials based on decentralized digital identity as well as X.509 public key certificates as outlined in ISO 17442-2:2020 - Financial services — Legal entity identifier (LEI) — Part 2: Application in digital certificates.
As with standard X.509 digital certificates, vLEIs will leverage ISO 5009:2022 - Financial services — Official organizational roles — Scheme for official organizational roles. Combining LEIs with official organizational roles is a key enabler for digital identity management for organizations and persons acting on behalf of organizations.
Karla McKenna
Convenor, ISO/TC 68/WG 11 Verifiable LEIs
Convenor, ISO/TC 68/AG 2 Standards Advisory Group
Managing Director and Head of Standards (GLEIF)
"The ISO/TC 68 community would like to express its thanks for the work of GLEIF in conjunction with ISO/TC 68/SC 8 in their innovative approach to provide secure credentials capable of identifying a legal entity and associated role associated with the legal entity which provides a global standard approach for not only managing identity in regulatory reporting but also commerce in general. Having this open globally supported standard for securely identifying counterparties provides a significant improvement in infrastructure that further increases the value of our global legal entity identifier system."
Jim Northey
Chair, ISO/TC 68 Financial Services
Nonexecutive Board Member, FIX Trading Community
Chief Technology Officer, CalcGuard Technologies, Inc.
"The extension of the ISO 17442 LEI standard to include verifiable LEIs (vLEIs) enhances digital identity management by enabling secure, tamper-resistant credentials for organizations and their representatives. The publication of the vLEI standard is the result of the dedicated efforts of Working Group 11 of ISO/TC 68/SC 8 led by Karla McKenna."
Dominique Tanner
Chair, ISO/TC 68/SC 8 Reference Data for Financial Services
Head, Product Management Reference Data, SIX Financial Information