CFTC’s LEI Portal Goes Live
August 20, 2012
A site developed for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that will issue identification codes for participants in swaps transactions was active Monday.
The site, developed by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation in conjunction with the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, eventually will provide codes that are in synch with the Legal Entity Identifier codes that will be used globally to identify participants in financial transactions involving stocks, bonds and other instruments.
On Monday afternoon, the CICI Utility Portal was up, running and returning search results. The site is expected to launch this week, according to DTCC director of corporate communications Stephen Letzler.
Search results from CFTC's Interim Compliant Identifier Portal, Monday afternoon.
An announcement from SWIFT is expected tomorrow.
The CFTC did not comment Monday.
The site will launch with about 24,000 CFTC Interim Compliant Identifiers, or CICIs. That is roughly the same amount as has been published in a test file on a website operated by the Global Financial Markets Association.
The GFMA, which is backed by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME) and the Asia Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association, have nominated DTCC and SWIFT to run the broader, global system of Legal Entity Identifiers as well.
That LEI project is being coordinated by the Financial Stability Board in Europe. The FST earlier this summer recommended to the leaders of the G-20 industrial nations a three-tier hierarchy of an oversight council, local registration authorities and a central operating body to issue the codes and establish a computationally logical means of maintaining a worldwide database of the registered numbers.
The global system could be launched as early as March 2013.
In the CFTC case, the codes will be used in the aggregation of data on derivatives trades. The use of credit default swaps were a central cause of the credit crisis of 2008 and the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform act mandated that a system of standardized swaps traded through electronic execution facilities be supervised by the CFTC.
The CFTC is also participating in the international process and expects the interim identifier “will transition into the global LEI.”
On August 9, Avox Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), launched an enhanced legal entity data portal at http://www.avoxdata.com.
The CFTC Interim Compliant Identifier Utility Portal is at http://www.ciciutility.org/
Here is its search page.
