LEI Everywhere

Ubisecure, through our RapidLEI service, has quickly become the most popular Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) Issuer worldwide, issuing more than 1 in 5 new LEIs every month. Today, we are excited to announce our next innovation with the launch of LEI Everywhere™.

LEI Everywhere makes LEIs more accessible to Financial Institutions and service providers (both technically and commercially) by enabling the full scope of the GLEIF’s new Validation Agent program.

LEI Everywhere offers a clear and simplified path to obtaining and maintaining LEIs:

Technical implementation of the GLEIF Validation Agent role through the RapidLEI API and SaaS dashboard

Enhanced verification for both initial LEI registration and subsequent renewals, assisting KYC (Know Your Customer), AML (Anti-Money Laundering), Customer Due Diligence (CDD), Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) onboarding and client refresh cycles

Reduced annual fees 

By making the LEI easier and less costly it democratises the LEI for end clients, thereby driving adoption and benefiting the ecosystem as a whole.

 

Why is LEI Everywhere important now?

Every month RapidLEI issues several thousand new LEIs. As a stakeholder in the Global LEI System (GLEIS) we are proud to contribute to an ecosystem where more than 1.8m organisations already use LEIs. However, we must recognise that as the global identifier, the true value of the LEI will be realised when it becomes ubiquitous amongst the tens of millions of legal entities around the world.

Increased ubiquity will introduce further organisation identity use cases, reduce identity fraud, help digitise manual processes, better streamline KYC/AML, and of course drive additional regulation adoption.

LEI-based Regulation

LEI is now being used successfully in over 160 different regulations (see full list of regulations requiring LEI). LEI is on the agenda of an increasing number of upcoming regulations, for example payment messaging. The digitalisation trend has resulted in demands to prove organisation identity for electronic cross border transactions.

KYC/AML

KYC has emerged as a strong use case where many Financial Institutions, Service Providers and Trust Service Providers utilise LEI to streamline and enhance client onboarding and refresh. Strong industry evidence exists that banks can greatly benefit from using LEI to reduce KYC costs (see GLEIF & McKinsey report).

 

Who is able to use LEI Everywhere?

LEI Everywhere is available to GLEIF-approved Validation Agents (VA). Typically, VAs are financial institutions such as banks, fintech, regtech, and KYC/AML service providers, and Trust Service Provider like Certification Authorities and Business Registries.

For organisations yet to be approved as VAs, the LEI Everywhere program helps take suitable candidates  through the GLEIF VA approval process.

 

Advantages to Legal Entities

The lower price points of the LEI Everywhere initiative removes any financial barriers to obtain and maintain an LEI, thereby encouraging VAs to bundle LEI in existing services, often on behalf of a client. Thanks to automation, LEI Everywhere eliminates the friction of a representative of the Legal Entity having to register the LEI themselves.

As LEI issuance is integrated into more KYC/AML processes, it provides an ideal ‘global’ identifier to connect various regionalised or private identifiers. This helps speed up any  onboarding process a Legal Entity may have to undertake, and helps the Legal Entity quickly meet the LEI ownership requirement, thereby avoiding transaction delays or non-compliance fines.

 

Advantages to KYC / AML service providers

LEI Everywhere is designed to help drive the KYC use case:

Easier: use of API to provide ability to mass issue (and manage lifecycle) to all clients seamlessly

Less costly: the ability to leverage existing KYC processes dramatically reduces back-end costs. LEI Everywhere passes this saving on to the VA. The price points enable the VAs to absorb costs and bundle with other services.

Leveraging existing KYC/AML and client refresh processes means the VA can obtain the LEI for clients whilst simultaneously removing the duplication of data validation processes. In many cases, LEI Everywhere will augment existing organisation identity data pools with accurate Legal Entity identity data and associated attributes.

KYC/AML service providers will attract new corporate customers who wish to use services that harness the LEI.

In general, LEI Everywhere will allow VAs to issue and manage LEIs on behalf of clients much more easily, and with significantly reduced costs and investment.

 

Lessons from the SSL/TLS World

Back in 2014, several organisations launched initiatives to drive the use of encryption across the web. Of particular significance, Let’s Encrypt and Cloudflare launched solutions that made SSL/TLS more accessible by introducing TLS/SSL Certificate issuance and installation automation, and removal of the commercial barriers usually associated with mass issuing Certificates. At the time only 50% of websites used SSL/TLS, now that number is almost 100%.  

LEI Everywhere takes considerable inspiration from the success achieved by these organisations. We have always seen strong parallels between SSL/TLS and LEIs, and LEI Everywhere gets us one step closer to a world where every Legal Entity maintains an accurate, up-to-date, referenceable, and usable identity.

 

How much does LEI Everywhere cost?

LEI Everywhere offers initial registrations and renewals at a significantly discount. All listed prices exclude the annual GLEIF fee. Contact our team for more details.

LEI Everywhere is available immediately to GLEIF-approved VAs, and organisations interested in becoming VAs. Talk to the RapidLEI team or your local RapidLEI Registration Agent today about next steps.