Datactics is offering a free LEI health check service that helps banks and asset managers ascertain the data quality of company information they hold in a legal entity master. The release of the service could not be better timed, with the MiFID II requirement for all counterparties to transactions to have a valid LEI coming into play on July 3, 2018.
The company’s LEI Match Engine service allows financial firms to compare and augment LEI data using the Global LEI Foundation’s (GLEIF) concatenated LEI file, and provides fast bulk matching that supports the submission of up to 5,000 entities in a single file and results in minutes.
The LEI Match Engine differs from GLEIF LEI search and match services in providing bulk matching, using Datactics’ fuzzy matching technology on entity names and addresses to compensate for abbreviations, keying errors and language character sets, and providing validation of a firm’s entities down to field level, for example checking a company’s LEI expiry date against information held in the GLEIF database. Fuzzy matching results are scored on a percentage basis to give users an indication of confidence in their accuracy.
LEI Match Engine is a product of Datactics’ matching engine technology that is used by banks for customer onboarding, Know your Customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering, and was developed as part of several live bank projects building a legal entity master using data from multiple sources.
Datactics product manager, Alex Brown, explains: “As part of MiFID II programmes we were asked by multiple clients for a dedicated match engine providing connectivity to the GLIEF for LEI validation. Having built this, it was a fairly straightforward job to make our scored fuzzy matching available as an internet service.”
The service is implemented in the cloud with front-end options allowing users to upload entity data and download augmented LEI data, as well as information on mismatches and differences in LEI attributes compared to those contained in the GLEIF file. Armed with this information, users of the service can decide how best to use their entity data.
LEI Match Engine is in production and is provided online at https://leimatch.datactics.com. It is free to users wanting to upload and check the LEI data of up to 1,000 entities in a bulk file. An on-premise version of the matching engine that connects a firm’s legal entity master to the GLEIF LEI concatenated file requires a software licence.
Stuart Harvey, CEO at Datactics, says the company is developing the LEI matching engine beyond the Level 1 name and address information held in the GLEIF concatenated file and will soon add BIC to LEI matching that will return a BIC code where available with LEI data. It also working on Level 2 ‘who owns whom’ data and looking at GLEIF Golden Copy Files that are due to be released later this year and will be distributed three times a day along with delta files that identify only newly issued LEIs and revisions to LEI reference data historically reported in a Golden Copy File.
