GLEIF and AEOTrade Sign MoU to Strengthen Digital Trade with Verifiable Organizational Identity

The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) and AEOTrade (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd. have formalized a strategic collaboration by signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) aimed at advancing verifiable organizational identity and promoting interoperable digital trade infrastructure worldwide. Under this agreement, both organisations will explore ways to integrate GLEIF’s Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and its verifiable vLEI extension with AEOTrade’s AEOTradeChain platform — a blockchain-based trade solution — to enhance trust, security and efficiency in global commerce.

The partnership comes at a time when international trade and supply chains are rapidly digitising, yet still grapple with fragmentation, opacity, and identity verification challenges. By embedding trusted digital identity standards such as the verifiable LEI into electronic trade documentation — including electronic bills of lading (eBLs) — the collaboration aims to ensure that every participant and document in the trade process is authenticated with consistent, globally recognised credentials.

Leveraging digital identity credentials builds on GLEIF’s broader mission to advance a secure global digital ecosystem for organisations, while AEOTrade brings its technical expertise in trade infrastructure and blockchain to the initiative. Together, the MoU partners will advance real-world use cases and build a more interoperable, inclusive and trusted digital backbone for cross-border trade.

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🧠 Key Highlights

• Strategic MoU signed between GLEIF and AEOTrade to promote verifiable organizational identity in global trade infrastructure.
• Interoperability focus: Integrating LEI/vLEI credentials with AEOTradeChain blockchain solutions to strengthen trust and data integrity.
• Trade documentation use cases: Targeted at secure, compliant electronic bills of lading (eBLs) and related supply chain processes.
• Prior hackathon success: Builds on AEOTrade’s runner-up performance at the GLEIF vLEI Hackathon showcasing “AEOTrade Chain+vLEI” applications.
• Focus on real-world deployments: Both parties will accelerate practical implementations and broaden digital trade technology ecosystems.

Why This MoU Matters

Addressing Trust and Efficiency Challenges in Global Trade

International trade remains a complex ecosystem involving multiple parties, jurisdictions, and documents — often managed through legacy paper-based processes, manual verification steps, and disparate digital systems. These inefficiencies contribute to increased costs, delays, and fraud risk. Introducing trusted digital identity standards such as the globally recognised Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and its verifiable digital counterpart (vLEI) helps establish a consistent, reliable basis for identifying parties in trade transactions.

The LEI is an ISO-compliant code that uniquely identifies legal entities participating in financial and economic transactions worldwide. It provides “who is who” data about organisations that engage in financial transactions. The verifiable LEI (vLEI) builds on this foundation by adding cryptographic features that support automated, tamper-resistant digital identity verification in trust-critical environments, such as cross-border trade.

Across supply chains and trade finance, the need for faster data sharing, error reduction and secure multi-party verification has never been greater. Embedding a globally consistent identity layer into key documents — particularly electronic bills of lading — can dramatically enhance transparency, reduce disputes, curb fraud and speed up operational processes.

Integration with AEOTradeChain: A Game Changer for Digital Trade

AEOTrade’s AEOTradeChain platform is a blockchain-enabled infrastructure designed to support complex cross-border trade processes and documentation. By integrating GLEIF’s vLEI credentials into AEOTradeChain, the MoU partners are effectively creating a trusted digital infrastructure where identity verification is native to every transaction and document lifecycle event.

For instance, in the case of electronic bills of lading (eBLs) — critical transport documents that represent ownership of goods — integration with verifiable organizational identities means:

• Each party signing, transferring or amending an eBL can be authenticated reliably.
• Document validity is ensured through cryptographically verifiable identities, reducing the risk of forgery.
• Consent, roles and responsibilities can be consistently tracked and validated across borders.

This not only streamlines the operational flow of international trade but also enhances compliance — particularly where financial institutions, insurers, regulators and customs authorities require trustworthy identity and transaction data.

Leveraging Hackathon Momentum and Innovation

The collaboration between GLEIF and AEOTrade builds on innovation momentum from the Global vLEI Hackathon, where AEOTrade was recognised as a runner-up for its “AEOTrade Chain+vLEI” framework in the Trade, Supply Chain, and SME Finance category. This solution demonstrated how vLEI integrated with blockchain can ensure authenticity and compliance of trade documents and participant identities — a cornerstone capability that now underpins the MoU’s objectives.

Such real-world innovation validation highlights the practical potential of vLEI adoption in mission-critical processes beyond financial markets, extending into logistics, shipping, supply chain tracking and trade finance.

Statements from Leadership

In announcing the MoU, Alexandre Kech, CEO of GLEIF, highlighted the strategic importance of verifiable organizational identity for global trade:

“Global trade continues to face fundamental challenges related to trust, fragmentation, and inefficiency — particularly as critical documents such as electronic bills of lading move fully into digital form. This collaboration with AEOTrade demonstrates how verifiable organizational identity, anchored in the vLEI, can help address these issues at scale by ensuring that every participant and transaction can be trusted by default.”

Zetao Yang, CEO of AEOTrade and Secretary General of TradeTech Alliance, added:

“Having showcased the benefits of integrating the vLEI into key trade documentation and processes, our ongoing engagement with GLEIF stands to promote interoperability and innovation to realise new use cases and enable trusted and efficient cross-border commerce.”

Broader Implications for Global Digital Ecosystems

Strengthening Interoperability Across Standards

One of the key challenges in digital trade and global commerce is the interoperability gap — where different digital identity standards, documentation formats, and regulatory frameworks operate in silos. The MoU between GLEIF and AEOTrade aims to bridge this divide by facilitating compatibility between global identity credentials and blockchain-based trade solutions.

Driving Adoption of vLEI in Trade and Supply Chains

While LEIs have long been used in financial markets to support risk management, compliance and transparency, the verifiable digital extension (vLEI) is opening new frontiers in trusted digital commerce. From secure onboarding of trading partners to automated compliance checks and authenticated digital signatures on trade documents, the integration of vLEI into trade platforms signals a maturing ecosystem for digital trust.

Supporting SMEs and Financial Inclusion

Enhancing trust and reducing friction in trade transactions also has important implications for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which often face barriers to finance and cross-border engagement due to complex verification requirements. Standardised, verifiable identities could reduce onboarding friction and unlock wider access to trade finance solutions.

Challenges and Next Steps

Technical and Regulatory Alignment

Integrating digital identity frameworks across jurisdictions and blockchain systems requires not only technical harmonization but also alignment with legal and regulatory frameworks governing trade, data protection and digital signatures.

Ecosystem Engagement

Realising the full potential of this MoU will require participation from ecosystem stakeholders, including logistics firms, financial institutions, regulators, technology vendors and supply chain partners — all of whom can benefit from greater identity trust and data interoperability.

Pilot Projects and Use Case Development

Both GLEIF and AEOTrade have indicated plans to accelerate real-world use cases — from expanding eBL implementations to exploring additional trade documentation and compliance scenarios that benefit from verifiable identities.

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