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Legal Entity Identifiers – and the Foundation That Champions the Standard – Are at a Crossroads

January 31, 2025 | 1 minutes reading time | By Michael Shashoua

The alpha-numeric codes that have been issued in hopes of averting systemic-risk pitfalls are only “foundational.” Can LEIs finally deliver on their bigger promises through digitization and tokenization?

Legal entity identifiers were a post-financial-crisis innovation designed to facilitate transparency of corporate interconnections of the sort that made transactions tied to the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy notoriously difficult to unravel.

The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) was established in 2014 to maintain the standard and carry the mission forward on an international scale. By now, with the U.S. Office of Financial Research LEI tracker showing more than 2.8 million entities registered worldwide (the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, China and India combined account for 1.2 million of them), more far-reaching goals and challenges lie ahead.

Promoting “Trust as the Foundation of Global Economy,” as goes the title of a 10th anniversary article on the GLEIF website, the organization is looking to bring LEIs into line with a financial industry that is rapidly digitizing and demonstrating ways to tokenize assets on blockchain, or distributed ledger technology.

The vLEI, or verifiable LEI, enhancement is designed to be compatible with digital and tokenization platforms, explains Alexandre Kech, CEO of GLEIF since last...

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