Sibos 2026: Eastnets' Baiba Miezere and Luay Gadallah on Portable Trust

Quick Summary

While financial transactions now move in seconds or sub-seconds, the verification of trust has historically lagged behind. At Sibos 2026, Baiba Miezere and Luay Gadallah of Eastnets explain how their Portable Trust solution aims to synchronise these two elements. By ensuring that trust signals, compliance checks, and digitised documents move at the same speed as the payment rails, Eastnets is helping financial institutions make faster, more secure decisions.

What is the core challenge facing modern financial transactions?

The primary issue in the current financial services landscape is that transaction speed has outpaced the speed of trust. While a payment can be completed almost instantly, the verification process remains slow and fragmented. Luay Gadallah notes that trust signals must move alongside financial transactions to ensure that institutions have all the necessary information, such as compliance checks and digitisation of documents, at the moment a transaction occurs. Without this synchronisation, the cost of verification becomes prohibitive, particularly for smaller participants in the market.

How does the Portable Trust concept address these delays?

Portable Trust is designed as an open platform that creates a verifiable audit trail. Baiba Miezere explains that the concept relies on connecting to primary sources of truth, such as GLEIF for vLEI numbers to verify legal entities. The framework, built on eIDAS 2.0 standards, allows for a layered approach to trust:

• Verification of the legal entity and the specific mandates of the signatory.
• Validation of trade documents within a single, independently verifiable audit trail.
• The use of a trust envelope that can be verified at any moment without needing the issuer to be online.
• Push notifications that alert participants if any information changes during the life of a deal.

What role does AI play in this new framework?

AI is highly effective at analysing large, complex datasets associated with modern transactions. However, Luay Gadallah points out that AI decisions alone are often insufficient for regulators. The Portable Trust solution provides the underlying data, including screening results and digital identity information, that allows AI to make faster and more accurate decisions than a human could. By presenting this comprehensive package of information to an investigator, the system empowers compliance officers to make definitive decisions on which direction a transaction should take, backed by a transparent and portable data set.

What are the primary use cases for Portable Trust?

The solution has moved beyond the ideation phase and is currently being tested in several practical proof of concept scenarios with banks. Key applications include:

• Internal Audit Trails: Connecting different departments within a complex banking organisation to provide a unified, unamendable evidence chain for regulators.
• Trade Finance: Streamlining documentary collections where trust signals move alongside standard messaging, such as MT400 messages.
• Secondary Markets: Allowing banks to offload portfolios to investors who can rely on the original verification checks, making loans more affordable for small and medium enterprises.

Beyond these initial cases, Eastnets is exploring applications for insurance companies and tokenised assets, maintaining an open system that can plug into various protocols and digital identity systems.

FF NEWS TAKE:

The friction between rapid payment execution and the laborious nature of compliance is one of the greatest hurdles in modern banking. Eastnets is tackling this by treating trust as a portable asset rather than a static, siloed check. By leveraging global standards like vLEI and eIDAS, they are not just speeding up the process but creating a more inclusive financial ecosystem where SMEs can access liquidity more easily. The focus on an open, non-proprietary platform is a vital step toward ensuring these trust signals can be recognised across the global financial network.