Open standards for business orchestration
Concert is the consortium steward for SIGNET — the open standard enabling governed networks of human and synthetic agents to transform procurement, commerce, and multi-party coordination.
The paradigm
Procurement is a $13 trillion market built on closed platforms. Concert exists to open it.
Today's procurement platforms extract rent from both buyers and suppliers, silo commercial data behind proprietary walls, resist interoperability, and fail to leverage the intelligent agent capabilities transforming every other domain.
Concert stewards an alternative: the GUILD paradigm — Governed, Unified, Intelligent, Linked, Decentralised networks where human and synthetic agents operate under shared governance with decentralised data sovereignty and cryptographic trust.
Three entities, one ecosystem
Steward. Standard. Operator.
Concert
The neutral consortium governing the standard, managing specifications, certifying participants, and protecting the ecosystem's integrity. Concert owns the IP and licenses it to commercial operators.
SIGNET
Secure Intelligent Governed Network for Exchange and Trade — the open specification for procurement networks. Model-agnostic. Tool-agnostic. Organisation-agnostic. The harness through which intelligence becomes procurement.
Score
The commercial entity building and operating SIGNET-compliant networks. Score turns the standard into production infrastructure — provisioning, integration, agent orchestration, and managed services.
The GUILD principles
Five properties defining every SIGNET network
Rules as code. Policy engines. AI Board oversight. Full audit trails.
PEPPOL. UBL. OCDS. W3C. Open standards as common language.
AI agents alongside humans. MCP and A2A protocols. Model-agnostic.
Solid Pods. Consent-based sharing. Data stays with participants.
DIDs. Verifiable Credentials. No central warehouse. No lock-in.
The harness layer
Agent = Model + Harness. SIGNET is the procurement harness.
Models are becoming interchangeable. The real leverage lies with whoever builds the execution layer that every model runs through — the runtime, orchestration, tooling, memory, policy, sandboxing, and verification that transform raw intelligence into production work.
SIGNET occupies this layer for procurement. Model-agnostic. Tool-agnostic. Organisation-agnostic.
Governance
Neutral stewardship. Open participation.
Concert's governance model follows the OpenPeppol AISBL pattern — a non-profit steward with multi-stakeholder representation, transparent decision-making, and no single-party control.
Standards Committee
Technical specifications, protocol evolution, interoperability
Buyer Councils
Procurement rules, entry criteria, category governance
Access Point Certification
Network participant validation and compliance
AI Governance Board
Agent safety, model oversight, ethical deployment
Ecosystem
Built on proven infrastructure
Research programme
Oxford foundations
Concert draws on Oxford University's research ecosystem across six capability domains, from the inventors of the protocols we build on to the scientists pioneering the fields we apply.
Solid Protocol
Data sovereignty and consent-based sharing
Multi-Agent Systems
Agent negotiation, cooperation, governance
Cryptographic Trust
ZKPs, protocol verification, regtech
Supply Chain
Provenance theory, transparency, ethics
Data Governance
Information economics, institutional design
Commercialisation
Venture infrastructure, £850M+ deployed
The first GUILD. The first SIGNET.
Concert is building the open infrastructure layer for a new era of governed, intelligent, multi-party commerce. Join the founding consortium.
Get in touch