Basel – The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) has announced a new collaboration with Certification Authorities (CAs) and Trust Service Providers (TSPs), to drive the use of Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs) within digital certificates. 

GLEIF has launched a CA Stakeholder Group to facilitate communication between GLEIF, CAs and TSPs from across the world, as they collectively aim to coordinate and encourage a global approach to LEI usage across digital identity products. Participation has already been confirmed by China Financial Certification Authority (CFCA), DigiCert, InfoCert, Entrust Datacard, ICAI India, and SwissSign.

The collaboration announcement follows news last year that ISO has standardized the process of embedding LEIs in digital certificates. In accordance with ISO 17442-2, the CA Stakeholder Group will develop and promote best practice guidelines and use cases for LEI integration across the digital identity industry. This will help members of the group, who are all committed to incorporating the LEI into their digital identity products, to progress their own implementations. GLEIF will also welcome participants’ views on current and future LEI services.  

The use of the LEI in digital certificates will deliver significant identity management benefits in a digital environment. Certificates linked to verified, regularly updated and freely available entity reference data by a unique, universal identifier are easier to manage, aggregate and maintain. There will also be greater transparency overall across the digital identity ecosystem.

“This is an important step in promoting the LEI’s capacity to enhance trust and add enormous value across the digital identity management systems which power the private sector,” comments Stephan Wolf, GLEIF CEO. “A unified and proactive global approach to embedding LEIs in digital certificates will rapidly extend the benefits of LEI adoption beyond regulatory use cases. Our aim is for the LEI to be harnessed as an enabler of advanced transparency in digital transactions and exchanges, and for its positive impact to deliver advantage and opportunity across the economy and society. We look forward to working with our new stakeholder group members and reporting developments in this space very soon.” 

Naijin Lu, from CFCA’s Strategic Development Department, comments: “CFCA is committed to incorporating the LEI into our digital identity products and we are already advanced in our related work efforts. We fully support this industry collaboration and are happy to be part of an initiative which brings the benefits of the LEI to a broad global audience, through an enhanced digital ID ecosystem.”   

Dean Coclin, Senior Director of Business Development at DigiCert, comments: “DigiCert looks forward to participating in this important initiative to advance standards that strengthen online identity protections for users. Widespread use of LEIs, among other enhancements, may improve user confidence in websites, devices and online applications, and this is in the best interest of all internet participants.” 

Cristina Andreoli, Business Compliance Consultant at InfoCert, adds: “InfoCert is fully behind participation in the GLEIF CA Stakeholder Group initiative. We recognize the value in the industry collaboration intended to share knowledge and coordinate efforts and actions to promote usage of the LEI within digital certificates and more widely, across the digital identity industry. We are excited to play our part.”