The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) has named digital trade specialist Merisa Lee Gimpel as a strategic advisor for the UK market, as the organisation looks to scale adoption across the financial ecosystem.
Lee Gimpel founded her own consultancy, Digital Trade Works, last year, and also advises Enigio, Mitigram and the Verifiable.Trade Foundation. She previously held roles spanning payments, working capital and digital trade at Citi and Lloyds, and was Revolut’s first head of supply chain finance.
At GLEIF, Lee Gimpel is tasked with bringing together regulators, financial institutions, corporates and industry groups to accelerate usage of the legal entity identifier (LEI) – a unique electronic fingerprint companies can use to demonstrate their identity and ownership – with a focus on the UK market.
The International Chamber of Commerce UK said in a 2024 report that LEIs could cut overall trade costs by US$100bn and widen access to financing for smaller companies, but that so far, they remained “underutilised”.
GLEIF, which was established with the backing of the Financial Stability Board and G20 central banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, also offers a verifiable LEI (vLEI), allowing organisations to delegate certain permissions to their employees.
“The UK is seeing significant momentum across trade, payments, digital identity and capital markets – areas where the LEI, and increasingly the vLEI, can play an important role in enabling trusted organisational identity and greater interoperability,” Lee Gimpel said.
“Drawing on my experience at Citi and Lloyds, I’ve seen first-hand the value that a globally recognised organisational identity can bring to the market by improving efficiency, transparency and trust across ecosystems.
“Today, the foundations are in place, with strong digital solutions already available. The next step is accelerating adoption so that organisations across sectors can fully realise these benefits.”
Lee Gimpel’s role is set to last for six months, starting immediately.
The move follows GLEIF’s appointment of Michaela Fleischer as chief operating and financial officer in March this year. The previous month, the organisation said it had partnered with Beijing-based technology company AEOTrade to promote interoperability between different identity standards.
