3 December 2025 – Frankfurt – The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) today named MSC Trustgate as the winner of its global vLEI Hackathon in the Industry 4.0 – Industry, Commercial & Finance Processes & Operations category.
GLEIF’s Global vLEI Hackathon saw an impressive 110 submissions from teams around the world, collectively showcasing the innovative ideas shaping the future of Digital Organizational Identity.
MSC Trustgate’s winning solution incorporates the verifiable LEI (vLEI) into its secure document signing portal, enabling signatories to digitally verify their identity and organizational authority, and bind this verification to the electronic signatures applied to their corporate PDFs. By seamlessly linking verifiable corporate identity with legally recognized digital signatures, MSC Trustgate’s vLEI-powered signing process bypasses the need for repetitive, manual Know Your Customer and Know Your Business checks which create onboarding friction and remain vulnerable to identity fraud. The result is a faster and simpler signing process, and a signed file which is recognized globally by Adobe Acrobat and other standard PDF readers, without additional plug-ins. This is achieved by linking the verified vLEI identity directly to a certificate issued under the Adobe Approved Trust List (AATL).
YourData, was named as the runner up. Its solution, Agent-Anchor, assigns vLEI identities to a company’s AI agents, providing new safeguards against the growing threat of AI generated impersonation, voice spoofing, and fraudulent messaging. By introducing the vLEI’s new layer of digital trust, customers interacting with a company’s AI agent can verify its true origin ‘live’ during calls and other interactions. The solution can also integrate with international digital identity wallets, like the eIDAS 2.0 EUDI Wallet, enabling deployment in existing user environments without requiring additional applications.
Hazhar Ismail, Executive Director, MSC Trustgate, said: “The vLEI has enabled us to bridge the long-standing gap between emerging trust ecosystems and established global standards. We have delivered a prototype that is secure, scalable, and globally trusted – one that judges, businesses, and regulators will recognize as both practical and transformative. The signing service will be particularly valuable for high-value corporate, banking, and cross-border commerce use cases, where only the highest levels of digital trust are permissible.”
Jaegyeong Yeom, Co-founder, YourData, said: “As companies increasingly interact with customers via callbots, chatbots, and automated messaging systems, Agent-Anchor demonstrates how both sides can interact with AI safely and reliably. Without a verifiable trust layer, malicious actors can easily leverage AI-spoofing to impersonate these tools and conduct large-scale fraud. Synthetic voices, fake chatbots, and phishing messages highlight the urgency of solving this verification gap.”
Alexandre Kech, CEO of GLEIF, said: “With Industry 4.0 in full flight, companies everywhere are in dire need of global digital identity solutions, to realize operational gains, safeguard against the tidal wave of new threats, and ease the process of complying with new regulations. By embracing the vLEI as a digital trust layer, our hackathon winners have shown how quickly and effectively this can be achieved when the right solution is in place.”
Ivan Mortimer-Schutts, Global Head of vLEI of GLEIF, said: “The vLEI hackathon has been very impressive and in a constructive spirit of collaboration. We thank each and every one for their ambition and innovative drive.”
The winners were named at an exclusive international forum on Digital Organizational Identity, hosted by the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, in Frankfurt.
All entries were rigorously evaluated by the international vLEI Hackathon jury, which comprises leading figures from global organizations, industry domains, and technical disciplines, ensuring a comprehensive and forward-looking assessment of every submission.
The vLEI is a digital, trustworthy attestation of the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) tied to the ISO 17442 Standard. This secure digital credential links an organization’s identity with a natural person and their role within it. By enabling peer-to-peer verification, the vLEI allows data, credentials, and transactions to be verified and shared without intermediaries, laying the foundation for a trusted global digital economy.
Since its launch in July, the vLEI Hackathon has challenged developers, entrepreneurs, and innovators worldwide to shape the future of digital trust by developing real-world solutions powered by digital organizational identity.
The vLEI Hackathon has enjoyed the steadfast support of leading organizations, including Affinidi, Apix, APSCA, Cardano Foundation, Chainlink, eBRAM, Cardano, EPA Asia, Esatus, Finoverse, Finternet Lab, FIWARE, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, fts.money, GFTN, Giesecke+Devrient, Hong Kong PKI Consortium, Hong Kong Web3 Standardization Association, ICC Digital Standards Initiative, INNOPAY, Key State Capital, LF Decentralized Trust, Vayana, Swift, Asia PKI Consortium, Vayana, Veriable.Trade, and more. Additionally, a rapidly growing network of Qualified vLEI Issuers (QVIs), including Certizen Technology, China Financial Certification Authority (CFCA), Finema, Global vLEI, Provenant, Shanghai Electronic Certification Authority (SHECA), Toppan Edge Inc., and TradeGo, has played a central role in helping participants in developing their submissions.
For more information on the vLEI, please visit the GLEIF website here.
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Full resolution images and logos can be downloaded via this link
https://www.gleif.org/en/newsroom/gleif-graphics-images
Contact
James Kemp
+44 (0) 113 350 1922
Relevant link
Glossary of terms
Legal Entity Identifier (LEI)
The Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) is a 20-character, alpha-numeric code based on the ISO 17442 standard developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The LEI connects to key reference information that enables clear and unique identification of legal entities participating in financial transactions. Each LEI contains information about an entity’s ownership structure, answering the questions of ‘who is who’ and ‘who owns whom’. It provides a universally recognized identifier paired with essential entity data, rigorous verification processes and high data quality.
Verifiable LEI (vLEI)
The vLEI concept is simple: It is the cryptographic secure digital counterpart of a conventional LEI. In other words, it is a digitally trustworthy version of the 20-digit LEI code which is automatically verified, without the need for human intervention. It gives government organizations, companies, and other legal entities worldwide the capacity to use non-repudiable identification data pertaining to their legal status, ownership structure and authorized representatives in any kind of digital interaction, transaction, or e-signature scenario.
About the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF)
Established by the Financial Stability Board in June 2014, the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) is a not-for-profit organization created to support the implementation and use of the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and its digital counterpart the verifiable LEI (vLEI). GLEIF is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland.
GLEIF’s mission is to manage a network of global partners to provide trusted services and open, reliable data for unique legal entity identification worldwide. GLEIF makes available the technical infrastructure to provide, via an open data license, online access to the full global LEI database free of charge to users. GLEIF is overseen by the Regulatory Oversight Committee, which is made up of representatives of public authorities from across the globe.
Diversity and inclusion underpin GLEIF’s values. This is reflected in its workforce of approximately 60 staff from over 20 nations, its operational excellence, and its commitment to open, global participation in the Global LEI System.
For more information, visit the GLEIF website at https://www.gleif.org/en.
Source:
Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation, St. Alban-Vorstadt 12, 4052 Basel, Switzerland
Chair of the Board: Teresa Glasser, CEO: Alexandre Kech
Commercial-Register-No.: CHE-200.595.965, VAT-No.: CHE-200.595.965MWST
LEI: 506700GE1G29325QX363
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