Chrinon, a UK-based company that gathers and provides open access to company data under the OpenCorporates brand, has set up a website called Open LEIs to provide an interface to the Global Legal Entity Identifier System (GLEIS).
The company has been involved in the development of the GLEIS since the beginning of 2012, serving on the initial advisory panel and taking part in the Private Sector Preparatory Group (PSPG). Recognising that the system is not yet complete, although pre-LEIs are being issued and used for regulatory reporting, the company has built Open LEIs as a free of charge, user-focused interface to the global pre-LEI and later complete LEI system.
Open LEIs is the second pre-LEI service that is independent of pre-Local Operating Units (LOUs) that issue LEIs and publish data on the identifiers they issue as well, in some cases, as data consolidated across all pre-LOUs. Chrinon states in its introduction of the Open LEIs service: “We hope the website will act as a prototype for future work, including by the LEI system itself, and that it will allow end users to start using the data with a low entry barrier.”
The first service, P-lei.org, was introduced in June 2013 by supply chain standards developer GS1, FIX Protocol, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and risk management specialist TahoeBlue. Similar to Open LEIs, the P-lei.org service is designed to make pre-LOU data available in a single format and free of charge to the public and other end users who want to access pre-LEI registration data.
The Open LEIs service from Chrinon uses XML and JavaScript Object Notation data formats and allows pre-LEI data to be searched using the name of an entity. The data can also be searched by address, or the entire database of over 100,000 pre-LEIs can be browsed, with drill down filtering the data by country, legal form or the Pre-LOU that assigned the pre-LEI. The data provides a URL for every pre-LEI as well as links to OpenCorporates, where additional data on an entity with a pre-LEI can be found.
