Everest, GLEIF, and ADB to streamline cross-border transactions between companies
Engagement with Everest, GLEIF and ADB allows companies to easily transact data and financial instruments with proper verification processes that utilize a Legal Entity Identifier (LEI)
San Diego & Malta, 08 December, 2020－Everest, the fintech leader in identifying individuals through their transactions for global compliance, announces the completion of a Proof of Concept (POC) with The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF), an organization created to drive adoption of a common identification system for corporations, trusts, and other entities. Everest and GLEIF’s combined effort demonstrates how providing digital, verifiable identities, along with a proper legal identifier tool, can empower businesses to execute more efficient and faster data and financial transactions across borders. Funding and guidance were provided by the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
In the world of finance, compliant transactions are everything, and they are rooted in identity verification, regulatory compliance, and transparent reporting. Without all three, it is virtually impossible to work with businesses or users in any serious capacity. At the moment, cross-border transaction systems are onerous, weighing down the ability to rapidly execute transactions. The biggest driver for this is the lack of a transparent mechanism through which the sender and receiver given transaction can be properly identified and verified. However, in layering the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) onto Everest’s identity + transaction platform, the transaction achieves a new level of compliance, while increasing transparency and reducing cost.
An LEI enables an entity to confirm its identity to others. By adding an LEI to Everest’s organizational identities, companies, partnerships, charities and other organizations become easier to verify. By adding corporate officer and universal beneficial owner (UBO) information from Everest to an LEI, on the Everest platform, companies are able to properly identify and transact over traditional or Everest rails by reducing transactional friction in cross-border trade. With an open-source repository of legal entity reference data, the Global LEI System (GLEIS) enables businesses to make smarter, less costly, and more reliable decisions about whom to conduct business. The Everest platform completes the other part of the identity and compliance dynamic by creating “organizational identities,” made up of digitally linked biometric identities of the officers and UBOs, and accounts/wallets to share data and send/receive both fiat and crypto transactions.
The POC demonstrates how companies in Australia and the U.S. can create their organizational identities with associated corporate officers and universal beneficial owners and how they can send funds from one entity to the other from each entity’s respective digital wallet (“EverWallet”), including fiat-over-SWIFT integrations and crypto. The wallets also include the required auto-generation of compliance reports to respective national financial regulators. The Everest platform, with LEI data from the GLEIS, facilitates cross-border transfers by attaching an account to a cost-reduced, on-boarding process of corporate entities, decreases risk, and ultimately enables corporates and the participating banks to achieve better business results. The infrastructural elements combine proof of an entity’s identity with the proof of the identities of the associated, biometrically verified human beings behind the relevant positions in corporations, trusts, and other entities.
“Everest is proud of our collaboration with GLEIF in bringing a brighter future of transparent and seamless data and financial transactions forward, all within compliance regulations,” says Everest CEO Bob Reid. “The opportunities for an open, regulated, and global transaction system are boundaryless, rendering concepts like shell companies obsolete.”
“Everest’s ability to tie biometrically verified users to an organizational identity and LEI will increase LEI volumes and broaden their usage, thus solving the issue of trust in financial transactions globally,” adds Stephan Wolf, CEO GLEIF. “Enhanced cross-border payments make a crystal clear connection between legal entity identification and a well-functioning global payment ecosystem.”
About Everest
Everest is the world’s only globally accessible, device-free cloud banking platform, solving the problems of seamlessly and compliantly transferring value around the world. Everest offers many services including identity verification, KYC/AML, banking, remittances, eGovernment, peer-to-peer payments, peer-to-merchant, crypto and compliance.
About 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). GLEIF is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. GLEIF services ensure the operational integrity of the Global LEI System. GLEIF also makes available the technical infrastructure to provide, via an open data license, access to the full global LEI repository free of charge to users. GLEIF is overseen by the LEI Regulatory Oversight Committee, which is made up of representatives of public authorities from across the globe.
About ADB
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) was conceived in the early 1960s as a financial institution that would be Asian in character and foster economic growth and cooperation in one of the poorest regions in the world. ADB envisions a prosperous, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable Asia and the Pacific, while sustaining its efforts to eradicate extreme poverty in the region. ADB maximizes the development impact of its assistance by facilitating policy dialogues, providing advisory services and mobilizing financial resources through cofinancing operations that tap official, commercial, and export credit sources.
