Legal Entity Identifiers special report

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Reaping the Rewards of LEI

After going through the process of defining the legal entity identifier
(LEI) at the behest of the US Office of Financial Research, and then seeking cooperation from countries worldwide, financial services firms are starting to see the benefits of implementation, as related by participants in the Virtual Roundtable in this special report about LEI.

³[The LEI] provides investment firms a common language to communicate about our counterparties, permits us to quickly assess risk in a major credit event, and will eventually bring efficiencies to on-board and the data maintenance process,² says Kyle Mooney, a vice president for reference data services at Credit Suisse. Beyond these functional benefits, Cheryl Mack, head of the data management group at UBS Global Asset Management, Americas, says she expects 50­60% of data managers in the financial services industry would implement LEIs even without the regulatory requirement.

Service providers are now more focused on LEI needs, coming forward with necessary data integration capabilities. ³Existing technologies and approaches have not proven to be effective,² acknowledges Peter Ku, director of financial services, solutions marketing at Informatica. Leveraging data integration to obtain counterparty data, reconcile, match and relate counterparties, are all parts of its solution, he adds. Others, such as Alacra, focus on mapping identifier data. Scott Preiss, a vice president at Cusip Global Services, sees LEI as important to all financial services firms, and Tony Brownlee, a managing director at data services provider Kingland, says he believes the LEI has value for risk management, compliance and data operations strategy.

With such a representative group of data professionals all attesting to the indispensable nature of the LEI for data management, it¹s no wonder the industry is seeing so much activity in LEI implementation, as our Roundtable conversation indicates.

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