LEI Website Ready to Launch, SWIFT Says
July 25, 2012
The website for operating the legal entity identifier system anointed by the Commodity Futures Trade Commission is ready for launch now, according to a SWIFT executive responsible for taking in registrations.
The website is ready for nearly immediate launch, says Paul Janssens, LEI Programme Director at the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.
“We just need to make sure that is precisely aligned with the requirements just put forward,” he said. “That website will soon go live.”
The LEI registration portal from DTCC and SWIFT.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission Tuesday said it picked the alliance of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation and the Society for Worldwide Financial Telecommunication to register and maintain a system of identifiying all parties to swaps transactions that it must supervise.
This is the first designation of a registration authority in what ultimately expected to be a worldwide system of creating legal entity identifiers.
In the CFTC case, the two parties will issue what currently are known as CFTC Interim Compliant Identifiers or CICIs. These will adhere to standards set by the International Organization for Standardization, until a global system based on those standards is set up.
The website will work in this way:
Any entity looking for a unique identifier to meet the CFTC’s requirements would go to the website to register for one’s own identifier code.
The website provides a database for query and for download if necessary.
The registering entity then provides background data that the website validates from official public sources to ensure quality.
After that, the website then randomly generates a 20-digit CFTC Interim Compliant Identifier.
He said that there are specific routines developed for the database to generate these numbers, make sure they are unique and they are viable over time.
For example, there are at least three steps to ensure each entity receives a unique randomized number.
The first step: At the level of the web portal itself, the system searches within the repository whether the registering company has already received a number.
The second step: The data analysts who receive the request have various processes, which go via a defined workflow within the identifier engine to make sure that no duplicates are issued.
The third step: Once the number has been generated, there is another check in the database to look for that sequence of numbers to make sure it hasn’t been assigned elsewhere.
Jannsens made certain to stress that the identifier generated by this system should not yet be considered as a global legal entity identifier. The CFTC was very specific in asking for an CFTC Interim Compliant Identifier.
