The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) has published the first monthly relationship file that matches a Business Identifier Code (BIC) assigned to an organisation against its Legal Entity Identifier (LEI). The file allows market participants to link and cross-reference these key entity identifiers free of charge, streamlining entity verification processes and reducing data management costs.
The open source BIC-to-LEI relationship file is built on a mapping process established by Swift and certified by GLEIF. It is published on the GLEIF website in CSV format and will be updated on a monthly basis. As of February 2018, more than one million LEIs have been issued to legal entities globally. Of the 130,000 BICs assigned to date, 45,000 pertain to organisations that are legal entities or foreign branches and qualify for mapping against LEIs.
Availability of the open source BIC-to-LEI relationship file will ease the process of gathering, aggregating and reconciling counterparty information based on interoperability across parallel identification platforms.
Stephan Wolf, CEO at GLEIF, says: “Entity identification can be a time-consuming, costly and complex task. Relevant information is often stored in disparate internal and external systems and tagged under different client ID numbers. The open source BIC-to-LEI relationship file is a step towards consolidating information. This will reduce the cost associated with entity verification.”
Harry Newman, global head of payments at Swift, adds: “The BIC-to-LEI relationships and related regulatory reporting data are in high demand among market participants. Mapping LEIs can be resource intensive, but at Swift we have a dedicated team focused on establishing the relationships to the highest quality.”
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