From Fragmented Records to a Global Institutional Identity: Why We Need an Interoperable Entity Identification Layer

From Fragmented Records to a Global Institutional Identity: Why We Need an Interoperable Entity Identification Layer
Noor Abutayeh — Founder of the GSEIN Project

In the digital economy, money, data, and services are crossing borders at unprecedented speed. Yet an institution’s identity often still starts from scratch whenever it moves from one system to another.

A company that has a national registration number may need to prove its identity again to a bank, an e-commerce platform, a payment provider, a procurement organization, and a partner in another country. The information may be accurate each time, but the way the entity is identified and linked to its original record remains fragmented across different databases, identifiers, and systems.

The Problem Is Not a Lack of Identifiers

Institutions do not suffer from a shortage of numbers. Countries have company registration numbers, tax authorities have their own identifiers, and specialized global identifiers already serve important purposes.

The Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), based on the ISO 17442 standard, provides a unique global code linked to verified reference data for legal entities and has gained particular importance in financial markets.

The D-U-N-S Number from Dun & Bradstreet provides a widely used global business identifier, while the GS1 system, through the Global Location Number (GLN), enables the identification of legal entities, locations, and functions within business environments and supply chains.

These systems are not a problem that needs to be overcome. Rather, they demonstrate the value of stable identifiers.

The real challenge emerges when we move from the question, “Does this entity have an identifier?” to a more difficult one: “How can a system in one country or sector recognize the same institution when it comes from another system?”

At that point, the issue becomes one of interoperability, not simply the issuance of another number.

Why Does Interoperability Matter?

Imagine that a company officially registered in one country wants to open an account with a financial services provider in another country. The system may request its legal name, address, registration number, and perhaps information about its legal status or ownership.

Then, a different platform may perform the same process a month later, perhaps using different sources or a different spelling of the name.

As businesses expand globally, this cycle is repeated thousands of times.

The result is not merely an administrative cost. Differences in spelling, translation, abbreviations, and legal forms can lead to duplicate records or incorrect matching. The same institution may appear in several forms: a local-language name, an English name, a trade name, an abbreviation, or different spellings.

Humans can sometimes infer that these names refer to the same entity. Automated systems, however, should not have to rely on guesswork.

This is why machine-readable institutional identity can become an essential part of digital infrastructure, just as APIs, instant payments, and cloud infrastructure have become common elements across many sectors.

What Should an Institutional Identity Layer Provide?

Any serious model for global institutional identity is not enough simply to generate numbers. The identifier should be linked to an institutional record whose source can be traced, while clearly distinguishing between the data required for verification and the data appropriate for public disclosure.

The core principles can be summarized as follows.
First, permanence. The identifier should remain linked to the same entity throughout its lifecycle and should not be reused for another entity.

It should also remain unchanged simply because a company changes its name, address, or website.

Second, a trusted source. The value does not come from the number alone, but from the ability to return to an official record or a trusted institutional source that establishes that the entity exists and that the information presented actually belongs to it. Knowing that an entity carries a particular identifier is not sufficient if the basis on which that identifier was linked to the entity cannot be established.

Third, interoperability. The identifier should function as a reference point across databases, platforms, and different systems, rather than remaining useful only within a single database.

Fourth, privacy. Verifying an institution does not necessarily mean making all the information or evidence used in the verification process publicly available. There can be a distinction between what the system needs to establish identity and what another system needs to recognize the entity. This is one of the important principles on which the GSEIN system focuses.

Fifth, machine readability. Financial systems, procurement platforms, APIs, compliance systems, and even AI agents need an identity that can be handled consistently and accurately without having to reinterpret the institution’s name each time.

The Idea Behind GSEIN

Within this context, the GSEIN initiative is being developed — short for Global Standard Entity Identification Number — as an attempt to explore a model for a permanent identifier for legal, economic, and institutional entities, linked to a unified record of the entity’s identity and its sources.

The idea is not to build a replacement for national registries. Official authorities in each country remain the reference point for establishing the legal existence of an entity and its status within their jurisdiction.

GSEIN also does not assume that existing identifiers such as LEI, D-U-N-S, or GLN should be replaced. On the contrary, these systems can be viewed as important parts of a broader ecosystem in which an interoperability layer can connect known identifiers to the same entity when the relationship is established.

The longer-term objective is to make it possible to refer to a particular institution through a stable reference even when the language, spelling of the name, or system interacting with it changes.

How Could Institutional Identity Work?

GSEIN starts with the record before it starts with the number.

When an entity enters the system, its data and sources are reviewed, basic formats are standardized, and the entity is compared against existing records to determine whether it represents an institution that has already been identified.

If it is established that the entity is new and independent, the verification process is completed, its record is preserved, and a permanent GSEIN is issued.

If the entity already exists, another number is not created simply because the information arrived from a new source or in a different format. Instead, the information is linked to the existing record and updated when necessary.

This makes the distinction between the identity of an institution and its data particularly important.

If a company changes its legal name or moves to a new address while maintaining the same legal personality, its identity does not start over. The same GSEIN remains associated with it.

If the company closes or is dissolved, the identifier does not disappear and is not reused for another entity. Instead, the status of the record changes while preserving its historical continuity.

If a merger or restructuring results in a new and independent legal entity, then that new entity has a distinct identity that warrants an independent identifier.

This approach prevents the system from becoming a collection of numbers that change whenever one of a company’s characteristics changes. Instead, the identifier remains linked to the continuity of the entity itself rather than to its temporary form in a database.

What Happens When Sources Conflict?

Working in this way raises another important question: what happens when sources disagree?

An official registry may carry significant weight, while another source may provide a different name or address, or newer data may arrive that does not agree with existing information.

In such cases, the model does not assume that the latest information received is automatically correct. Instead, the nature and reliability of the source, the date of the data, and its legal status are reviewed.

If the conflict cannot be reliably resolved, it remains subject to review rather than replacing the existing record through an automated decision that cannot be explained.

Governance and Trust

This leads directly to the issue of governance, because the value of a global institutional identity does not come from the accuracy of an algorithm alone. It also depends on clear rules that determine when an identifier is issued, when it remains unchanged, how institutional data is updated, and how errors and conflicts are resolved.

At the current stage, the operational structure of the GSEIN project is managed by separating the stages of record intake, verification, preservation, and identifier issuance, while retaining sources of evidence and a record of changes.

Governance is therefore not a secondary element of the project but part of its structure. The rules for issuance, the lifecycle of the identifier, correction mechanisms, and conflict-resolution procedures are expected to be documented and clear enough to understand why a particular identity is associated with a particular entity and how its data reached its current state.

An identity whose history cannot be explained may be just another number. An identity whose source can be traced and whose lifecycle can be understood becomes closer to an infrastructure that other systems can rely on.

The Relationship with Existing Identifiers

This also makes the relationship with existing identifiers clearer.

A single institution may have a national registration number, an LEI, D-U-N-S, or GLN, and perhaps a tax identifier. There is no reason for GSEIN to attempt to eliminate any of these identifiers.

Instead, when the relationship is documented, a GSEIN record can serve as a linking point between them, allowing a system to understand that these different identifiers refer to the same institutional entity, while preserving the function and source of each identifier.

For example, if a company has an LEI, the value is not in replacing it with a new number. The value lies in having a layer that can tell different systems that these two identifiers belong to the same institution.

This makes the gap GSEIN seeks to address more specific: the problem is not that an institution lacks an identifier. The problem is that its identity is distributed across multiple identifiers and systems without a shared layer that connects them to the same entity in a stable and verifiable way.

The longer-term objective is to make it possible to refer to a particular institution through a stable reference even when the language, spelling of the name, or system interacting with it changes.

This changes the nature of the search. Instead of asking, “Does this name resemble another name?”, a system can ask: “What institutional identity is associated with this record, what other identifiers are associated with it, and what is the source of that relationship?”

Why Might the Idea Matter to the Arab Economy?

The Arab region faces an additional challenge arising from the continuous movement between Arabic and English, differences in transliterating names between scripts, and variations in regulatory structures and registries from one country to another.

This environment makes matching the identity of companies and institutions across borders more complex, particularly in trade, payments, investment, procurement, and academic cooperation.

At the same time, this challenge represents an opportunity.

The region does not have to be merely a user of digital identity infrastructures developed elsewhere. Projects originating in the region can address a global problem and test models that account for multilingualism, different legal forms, and varying levels of readiness among official sources, while maintaining the principles of trusted sources and privacy.

This does not mean that one project will solve the issue on its own. Global institutional identity inherently requires cooperation among official registries, standards organizations, the financial sector, data providers, business platforms, and technology organizations.

The real value may lie in these systems being able to communicate with one another, rather than one system attempting to eliminate the others.

AI Makes the Question More Urgent

There is another reason why the issue has become more important than before: automated systems are beginning to take on roles that previously depended entirely on humans.

AI systems search for suppliers, read contracts, review documents, collect company data, and assist with due diligence processes.

As the economy becomes increasingly dependent on automated agents, the need for a verifiable answer to a seemingly simple question becomes more important:

Which institution are we actually dealing with?

If there are no stable reference points for institutional identity, automated systems will continue to rely on name matching and contextual clues.

A permanent identifier linked to a documented source, however, can reduce ambiguity and help build more accurate applications, while decisions concerning verification and compliance remain with the responsible authorities.

From a Database to Infrastructure

The difference between a business directory and institutional identity infrastructure is important.

A directory helps users find information. Institutional identity infrastructure, by contrast, aims to help systems understand that a set of data, records, and transactions refers to the same institution.

The first is an information product; the second can become a shared layer used by multiple products.

For this reason, the future of institutional identity may not be “one global number that replaces everyone else,” but rather an ecosystem of interconnected identifiers and records, each with its own role, source, and rules.

Within such an ecosystem, the ability to connect, verify, and preserve continuity becomes more important than attempting to place the entire world inside a single database.

The question worth discussing today is not whether companies and institutions need additional numbers, but how their identities can be made verifiable and usable across borders and systems without sacrificing source integrity or privacy.

If we succeed, institutional identity could become a new foundational layer of the digital economy, alongside payments, communications, and cloud infrastructure.

GSEIN is an attempt to contribute to this discussion through a practical model being developed from the Arab region.

Its ultimate significance may be less about the number itself and more about the question it seeks to answer:

How can the digital world recognize the same institution, consistently, as it moves across systems and borders?

About the Author

Noor Abutayeh, PhD in Information Science, is the founder of GSEIN – Global Standard Entity Identification Number, an initiative under development to explore a permanent and interoperable institutional identification framework for legal and economic entities within Rawaas LLC.

Project website: gsein.org