The BIS and the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) have jointly demonstrated how the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) can cut compliance costs and reduce onboarding friction for SMEs accessing cross-border financial services.
The initiative, known as Project Aperta and led by the BIS Innovation Hub Hong Kong Centre, produced a working prototype that links domestic open finance networks across five jurisdictions — the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Hong Kong, and India — through a shared interoperability layer. When a business authenticates itself using an LEI, the system is able to streamline Know Your Business (KYB) and anti-money laundering (AML) checks without duplication, reducing the administrative burden typically associated with cross-border account opening and payment initiation.
The project was developed in partnership with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Central Bank of Brazil, the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, and the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority. GLEIF, the International Chamber of Commerce Digital Standards Initiative, and the Hong Kong University Standard Chartered Foundation FinTech Academy also participated. Testing was conducted alongside commercial banks and FinTechs from the private sector.
The prototype directly addresses two of the pain points identified in the G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-Border Payments — namely the complexity of compliance processes and the lack of interoperability between national open finance frameworks. At present, differences in technical standards, data formats, and trust frameworks mean that businesses, particularly SMEs, are routinely subjected to repeated manual document checks and extended onboarding timelines when operating across borders. Project Aperta demonstrates how connecting these existing infrastructures could make trade finance and banking services more accessible across jurisdictions.
GLEIF is the Frankfurt-based international body responsible for implementing and overseeing the Global LEI System, a framework that enables precise and automated identification of legal entities participating in financial transactions worldwide. The LEI is a 20-character alphanumeric code that links to key reference information about an organisation, making it usable as a verified identity attribute within payment messages and account-opening processes.
The project also points to potential applications in digital asset markets. The prototype illustrates how integrating the LEI into emerging tokenised finance infrastructure could support verified data exchange between financial institutions, digital asset platforms, and regulators, contributing to greater transparency and regulatory oversight. This builds on growing industry momentum, with bodies including the Financial Action Task Force, BIS’ Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures, The Wolfsberg Group, and the Swift Payment Market Practice Group all having previously recognised the LEI’s role in cross-border payments.
GLEIF CEO Alexandre Kech said, “Any web of domestic networks that seeks to make legal entity data portable across borders needs a globally standardized system of verified organizational identity. The Global LEI System serves this purpose precisely: it helps infrastructure, businesses, and entities make verified business data as widely available as possible, globally. When the LEI is added as a data attribute in a cross-border payment message, or consulted in a business account opening process, the associated legal entity can be precisely, instantly, and automatically identified across borders. We’ve been delighted to collaborate with the Bank for International Settlements to showcase these capabilities as part of Project Aperta.”
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