Board Approves Standard for Global Identifier
May 30, 2012
An international body established to coordinate the work of national financial authorities and international standard setting bodies affirmed Wednesday that it will recommend a 20-character system for identifying financial market participants to leaders of the world’s 20 primary industrial countries.
The Financial Stability Board said it approved at a meeting in Hong Kong a legal entity identification code that is “in line with the ISO 17442:2012 standard published today.’’
The DTCC's LEI portal, in early May.
That was a reference to a standard developed by the International Organization for Standardization which describes a 20-character alphanumeric code for identifying legal entities worldwide that participate in financial transactions. The code will help regulators measure, monitor and deal with risks to the global financial system.
The code includes additional elements for reference data attributes, ISO said.
The FSB said it will recommend the establishment of a global LEI system with the unique global identifier to the Los Cabos Summit of leaders of the G20 nations that will be held June 18 and 19 in Mexico.
The board said it “targets launch of the global LEI system on a self-standing basis” by March 2013.
The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation in the United States plans to open a Web portal Friday (June 1) where financial firms can apply for such codes (left).
A separate portal for taking in registration applications has been set up by New York consultancy Financial InterGroup, as of May 30 (below).
Driving those dates in the United States is the launch of centralized clearing of credit-default and interest-rate swaps, under the supervision of the Commodity Future Trading Commission. The CFTC is requiring the codes beginning July 16.
Both LEIs and the central clearing of swaps are outgrowths of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act of 2010. The clearing of swaps puts a central counterparty in between both sides of a trade. The idea is to shield each party from each other, with the central counterparty guaranteeing each end of the transaction.
