SWIFT announces the availability of the Entity Plus Directory, introduced to help organisations with their entity data management processes. The tool will help enable compliance with a number of new regulations which require financial institutions to report counterparty transactions, identify entities, calculate risk exposure and cross-reference data.  Through Entity Plus, financial institutions can accurately cross-reference multiple identifiers of an entity in real-time, such as BIC, LEI, GIIN and MIC.

National and international regulatory requirements for transaction reporting require the exact identification of the counterparty, placing a greater need for accurate and high quality entity identifiers. Using data that is updated in real-time through Entity Plus, financial institutions can obtain a consistent view of legal entities helping meet the entity data challenges of regulations such as EMIR, Dodd-Frank, FATCA, AIFMD, MiFID II and MiFIR.

Hervé Valentin, Head of Reference Data at SWIFT, says: “Many of the regulations spawned out of the financial crisis place great emphasis on the identification of legal entities, making compliance with regulatory reporting requirements a critical challenge for financial institutions. The introduction of SWIFTRef enabled us to deliver accurate and comprehensive reference data to our community, and Entity Plus adds another dimension, providing the granular detail that our customers now require to comply with new regulations.”

Entity Plus also enables financial institutions to:

·         Translate different transaction codes to LEI or GIINs for regulatory reporting

·         Match different counterparties’ names such as legal and trade names and their parent and ultimate parent LEI

·         Access a dedicated team monitoring the accuracy of data in real-time to match new LEIs with the existing ones

·         Align data between Entity Plus and SWIFT KYC Registry for deeper compliance information

·         Access hierarchy and ownership information to calculate counterparty risk exposure

Data publication is available as a monthly and daily (2016) file in TXT or XML format, securely and automatically downloadable from SWIFT or delivered directly through FileAct.

For more information about SWIFTRef, visit www.swift.com/SWIFTRef.