Ahead of final government and industry deliberations on the development and issuance of a standard Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) to meet global regulatory requirements, vendors are moving forward by enhancing their capabilities to capture data and by linking standardized and proprietary identifiers.
Omgeo has added legal entity data (LEI) capture capabilities to Omgeo ALERT, the web database for settlement and account instructions. This follows the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which prompted market participants to seek to gain a better understanding of which legal entities they were trading with.
Bill Meenaghan, global product manager for ALERT at Omgeo, said: The creation of legal entity support in ALERT is an example of Omgeo initiating practical steps towards providing ALERT clients with greater transparency in the markets.
Avox, the newly launched subsidiary of The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), will maintain the legal entity data that populates the additional 23 data fields including legal name, trading status, date updated, aliases, BIC, and registered and operating addresses. Ahead of the proposed implementation of regulatory requirements for a global LEI standard, a field has also been created to capture and populate LEIs in ALERT.
Meenaghan added: While this is an independent initiative, in anticipation of a mandated Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), we have added an LEI data field in accordance with regulatory requirements and in support of the LEI.
The new Omgeo ALERT legal entity fields, with data population from Avox, are subscription-based fields. For joint ALERT/Avox clients, the Avox ID (AVID) can be made available to link both the ALERT and Avox datasets together.
Separately, S&P Capital the provider of multi-asset class data, research and analytics, today announced efforts to both incorporate the LEI into its reference product suite, while also enhancing its cross reference services. In the next few months, S&P Capital IQ will launch a Business Entity Cross Reference Service (BECRS) that will include vendor specific Entity Identifiers linked to a single S&P Capital IQ identifier.
S&P Capital IQ is using the S&P Capital IQ Entity ID as its primary data key and will cross-reference standardized and proprietary identifiers and identify the ultimate parent, thus providing the foundation for master reference data, trading databases, client relationship management systems and more to support activities from the front to the back office.
In this way, S&P Capital IQs Business Entity Cross Reference Service (BECRS) is able to provide immediate cross reference capabilities to millions of entities. The offering will also provide descriptive data to help users identify a particular entity or issuer.
(JDC)