In this episode of The Connector Podcast recorded at Cyberport in Hong Kong, host Koen Vanderhoydonk interviews Alexandre Kech, CEO of Glyphe and representative of the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF). Kech explains the origins of the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) system, created after the 2008 financial crisis to give regulators a global view of corporate exposure, and its evolution into the verifiable LEI (vLEI) that adds cryptographic proof of identity for entities and the individuals acting on their behalf. The conversation covers how Glyphe serves as the root of trust, accrediting qualified vLEI issuers (QVIs) who verify both entities and their officials, enabling use cases such as single‑sign‑on, permissioned access, and digital signatures that bind a person’s authority to the company. Kech highlights regional adoption, noting rapid growth of LEI issuance in APAC, the opening of a Glyphe office in China, and the region’s leading interest in verifiable credentials. He shares insights from a recent global hackathon that attracted over 110 participants from banks, exchanges, and fintechs, revealing a breadth of innovative applications. For mid‑sized firms, Kech advises first obtaining an LEI, identifying trust gaps, and collaborating with partners and industry groups to integrate vLEI into authentication, supplier onboarding, or other processes. Looking ahead, he outlines a 12‑month roadmap: increased EDI usage for cross‑border payments, scaling vLEI implementations, and a pilot with the GSMA Foundry to secure telecom call origins. The episode concludes with a reminder that GLEIF provides free LEI data via APIs and that organizations can become LEI issuers, qualified vLEI issuers, or users within the global ecosystem.
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Welcome to The Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks, and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen Vanderhoydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
Welcome everybody today from Cyberport in Hong Kong for another podcast with The Connector. I have a special guest, Alex from Glyphe. Alex, can you introduce yourself and can you also explain what Glyphe does?
Absolutely, thank you for having us. Alexandre Kech, CEO of Glyphe. Background in banking, infrastructure, and digital asset and digital identity. So Bank of New York Citibank on the banking side, SWIFT for many years on the infrastructure side, and crypto and digital asset thereafter.
You did it all?
I did it all, exactly. It's a nice CV for what we're doing because Glyphe is specialized in identification of legal entities. So it was created after the 2008 crisis, a realization by the regulators and the banks that they didn't have a clue of the exposure they had, the risk they had towards their counterparts, because those counterparts were identified at national level. With a national identity, and there was no global identity system for legal entities. So CLIVE was created by the Financial Stability Board, which is a creation of the G20 after the financial crisis, to set up a system enabling anybody to know in the world who is who as a legal entity and who owns who as well, which is quite important. So the hierarchy of ownership behind a legal entity. So the system has been live for 10 years now, more than 10 years. It initially started in capital markets and OTC derivative use case, counterparty identification, regulatory reporting. And it's now moving to other fields such as cross-border payments with FATF recommendations. So rules to prevent money laundering and financing of terrorism cross-border. And therefore you need identification of companies. And also more and more into the fintech world and technology world. With the creation of the verifiable legal entity identifier, which enables an entity to prove who they are on Web2, Web3, on any platforms, but also people acting on behalf of that company or system acting on behalf of that company to prove that they are legit in behaving or acting or signing on behalf of that company.
And the verifiable lei, that's the vLEI, and that's the new kid on the block. So What is it actually solving for companies?
It solves multiple things. The number of use cases we've seen, and we're here in Hong Kong for a VLAI hackathon where we had so many use case suggestions, is really broad. But in a nutshell, it enables verifiability of who is in front of you on a digital platform. So here we're talking to one another. I see you, you see me. It's easy to prove—
I can pinch your arm.
Exactly. I can show you my ID card, my business card, and you will know who I am. On digital platform, you don't have that. So verifiability of who is on the other side when you're dealing with someone on digital platform or a company on digital platform. Permissioning, so giving access to that entity into systems. For example, a single sign-on for companies into various platforms that enables that. And also permissioning, of course. So authentication, permissioning, and signing as well, digital signatures on contracts. With the difference that With current methods of digital signatures leveraging digital certificates, for example, you end up with one person signing on its behalf, but not one person signing on its behalf as a delegated authority or as a CEO of a company.
Mm-hmm.
What VDI enables in that use case is to cryptographically bind an individual acting on behalf of the company with the company in a verifiable way. Which is revolutionary. That's the only infrastructure that does that.
Yeah, so automatically you create also a virtual registry of all the UBOs, the Ultimate Beneficiary Ordnance. You could do that.
Yeah, absolutely. So that's called an Official Organizational Role in our world of vADI credentials. So an entity can effectively assign an OOR after verification by a third party, like in the real world, a notary. In our case, it's a qualified vADI issuer. So they can issue Official Organizational Role credentials to their directors, to their UBOs, to their CEOs, CFOs, etc. And then these can prove to anybody that they are effectively the acting person for that company.
Because that would have been my next question. If that's a system, Glyphe is not the one that's issuing, that's then the qualified VI, the QVI.
Exactly. So we are the root of trust. So the root of trust in a cryptographic system is where everything back to for guaranteeing the trust of the system. And Glyphe, as I mentioned, has been created by regulators and is overseen by regulators today. So it's a strong root of trust. Then we accredit qualified VLEI issuers. We qualify qualified VLEI issuers who are then responsible for verifying the identity of not only the legal entities, but the people acting on behalf of that legal entity, official organizational role, and issue credentials to them. And then the entity, and that's important, autonomously can start issuing other credentials. Credentials to their staff to access the building, to log in onto a system, to sign on behalf of the company. Credentials to systems, a computer, an AI agent, to prove that that computer or AI agent is controlled by that legal entity and is authorized to do stuff from that legal entity.
So it has a very strong ripple effect, if you want. I saw that recently you opened an office in China. So what does APAC mean for you and what's happening?
So Asia has been a regional focus of us for the last probably 5 years, I would say, 4 or 5 years, very successfully. So the number of LEIs issuance in Asia-Pacific has grown significantly in the last years in India, in China, in Japan, etc. The reason why we open an office in China is because we need to anchor that presence a bit more than before, because China and the Greater Bay Area, more specifically Hong Kong, Macau, and almost the Belt and Road countries as well, is becoming more and more important to us because they are using EDI extensively. So a few examples: the China Interbanking Payment System, CIPS, is using EDI as a primary key for Identifying legal entities on the VDI side, we have now eight QVI's qualified VDI issuers globally. Six of them are in Asia, and actually four of them, if I'm not mistaken, are in the China area. So Hong Kong and China. So it demonstrates that there is a clear interest for the VDI system in this region. So we want to be present and support this a bit more.
How do you compare the China region with, for example, Europe, America, other global places?
So on the LEI side, so the legal entity identifier side, reference dataset number usage and mandates, regulatory mandates, Europe is the highest user of the LEI system. The US comes second, although India is catching up in terms of usage as well. And then you have Asia that is a Clearly following through. So how does it compare on the ADI side? They're still catching up, I would say, what has been initially initiated in Europe and in the US and is being adopted in Asia Pacific. On the VADI side, so the verifiable credential part, they're way in advance to the rest of the world because this region by almost DNA is more forward-looking, more dynamic than Europe and the US, at least today. And they're very interested in new technologies. They're very fragmented in terms of jurisdictions and technical infrastructure.
So the benefit is high.
Exactly. VLEI is that interoperability layer that they need to do more business among themselves, but also with the rest of the world.
You recently ran a global hackathon to grasp ideas from the industry. What has been your finding? on that hackathon?
I was mentioning that at the beginning, the number of use cases possible for VDI. We're always amazed by the creativity of QVI, Qualified VDI Issuers, but also software providers and solution providers on how they can leverage the capabilities of the VDI, which we just described. And I would say that, and the number of contestants. We had, I think, 110— more than that, yes— contestants. And very, very strong from large banks like Lloyds Bank or large institutions like the London Stock Exchange and Clearstream to smaller fintech, to people who want to get into it and see an opportunity, a business opportunity.
Well, that's the beauty of a hackathon, isn't it?
Absolutely. And so that was the two, I would say, main surprises or at least learnings from that first edition because it's a first Yeah, and later, and also for the listeners, I would say stay tuned because the winners will be announced soon.
If I would be a mid-sized company, how can I benefit from the VLEI and how can I get started?
So first, you need to get an LEI because that's the foundation of identity that is required for a VLEI. And then you should probably look at what are your pain points as a company. in terms of authentication of your customers or authentication of your suppliers or participating or bringing trust into your own company for others to use you as a provider of service, for example. And depending on that use case, develop with partners, technical partners, solutions to leverage the VLEI to build that trust layer that you're missing in parts of your business.
Mm-hmm.
This is a collaborative type of approach, right? You can't just use VDI on your own if nobody around you wants to use it. So get involved into industry groups that are talking about the use of EDI and VDI, like the ICC DSI Initiative in trade, like the Payments Market Practice Group in payments, etc., etc., and see how you can collectively benefit from a system of identification.
Now, earlier you said that it's 10 years ago that delay numbers were introduced. And I remember because I was part of the market board in Belgium. Now, instead of looking back, looking forwards, how does success look like for you in 12 months?
So in 12 months, that's a bit short-term for a global system, but we still look at that timeline. So on the EDI side is we start seeing an increase of usage of the EDI for cross-border payments. And progressively in trade as well, and trade and supply chain. But that's going to be progressive because these things take time to change. And you know how banks can be sometimes a bit slow, for example, to move. But the corporates and the corporate treasurers of these worlds are pushing the banks to move towards the LDI. So very confident there. On the VDI side, this year and last year has been about establishing the system, launching the system, piloting the system. And now we've been trying this year to build the ecosystem of software and service providers who supports the VDI. credentials and can offer services around it, and also QVI. The next year will be around real implementation, like scaling of the implementations of VLEIs in various use cases. We have one that is likely to be quite successful and launch next year, which is around the securing of telecommunication companies— telecommunication calls, sorry.
Mm-hmm.
So proving the origin of a call. I don't know about you, but I don't answer my phone anymore because it's either a scammer or someone who wants to sell something.
Check.
Exactly. And that's a major problem for telcos because their services are not used. It's a major problem for companies because they can't reach their customers by phone anymore. And there is a project run by the GSMA Foundry to pilot the VLEI/DLEI to secure the transactions from origins to to receiving entity or receiving person in a way that you finally answer the phone.
Well, so exciting times ahead. Maybe as a last comment on this podcast, if people want to get started with GLEIF, how do they find you? How do they contact you?
So we obviously have a website, gleif.org, where you have a lot of information about various use cases, where you can find a database of legal entity identifiers for free. So all the data that we have about legal entity These are available for free to anybody to use through APIs, through file downloads, through lookups. So that's important also to mention. It's a non-for-profit foundation. We are public good. We're not there to sell commercially products. We're here to make data available for products to be built. That's important to mention. And then depending on what role they want to play in the global LEI system, they could want to become an LEI issuer or a qualified vLEI issuer or simply a user. They can be put in contact with that network of partners we have around the world to collaborate and work on solutions.
Very clear. Alex, thank you very much for participating in this podcast. Thank you also to the listeners, and stay tuned. More news will come soon. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Connector Podcast. To connect and keep up to date with all the latest, head over to www.koenvanderhoydonk.com. Jointheconnector.com or hit subscribe via your podcast streaming platform.
