IBEI Suppliers Tout Their Wares At London Gathering

A number of suppliers of business entity identifiers got together to tout their wares to a small assembled crowd of practitioner firms in London earlier this month under the ISITC banner. Although there is an ISO process underway for a naming convention related to International Business Entity Identifiers (IBEI), this is a slow process and it may at least a year or two before any fruits of this labour are seen. Institutions still need a solution to the ever-growing problem of entity identifiers for regulatory purposes (KYC and AML for example), and no one believes the market will support just a single supplier. Instead, the aim is to encourage vendors to talk to each other and hope for agreement on contentious issues. As such presentations were given by firms including Accenture, Asset Control, Azimuth’s Azdex (reportedly teaming up with Deutsche Borse), Cicada’s Counterparty Link, Coexis, Dun & Bradstreet, Oracle, Standard & Poor’s, and others. Some firms declined to present their offerings with other competitors in the room, or were not ready in time. Companies including Adsatis’ CreditDimensions, IBM, London Stock Exchange and SunGard did not present. According to several attendees, however, it is not clear what direction ISITC intends to take to follow up on this meeting.