Today Ubisecure, an accredited Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) issuer through its RapidLEI service, announced a next generation LEI management solution designed specifically for banks to better manage and protect business-critical LEIs belonging to both clients and the banking organisation itself. The new solution provides LEI discovery and single view consolidation, automated registration, and renewal protection, while reducing the LEI management burden on the bank’s administration teams.

It's paramount that banks ensure that both internal and client LEIs are acquired and, crucially, protected from lapsing. Lack of a mandated LEI risks holding up a trade or, even worse, potential regulatory non-compliance fines. More often than not, organisations without LEIs find they need one at a critical point and banks have to act quickly to acquire LEIs by referring clients to various Local Operating Units (LOUs, LEI issuers). As a result of this ad-hoc method, banks have no single view of internal or client LEI statuses, meaning valuable admin time is spent applying and managing them.

RapidLEI from Ubisecure solves these issues, helping banks to ensure that internal and client LEIs are automatically issued and renewed with minimal time and effort. The service enables banks to take control with easy steps: firstly discovering all existing LEIs within their own group or client groups; then consolidating them in a single view; automating new issuance and avoiding lapsed LEIs with multi-year and alerts. This is all with support from a dedicated account manager and a single contract.

Paul Tourret, Chief Development Officer at Ubisecure said, “As banks increasingly depend on LEIs for business-critical processes, it’s crucial that they are managed seamlessly and securely. RapidLEI has pioneered automated same-session issuance technology, letting algorithms do the heavy lifting so our customers save time and money compared with traditional methods.

“To meet the demand of the banking community we’ve developed a solution that combines the technology advantages of our platform with independently rated 5 Star customer service and enterprise class account management. We are focused on removing the risk, cost and headaches banks face when managing their internal and client LEIs.”

A LEI is a 20-character identifier that identifies distinct legal entities. Endorsed by the G20 and defined by the ISO 17442 standard, LEIs create greater transparency and trust in transactions and are mandated by certain regulations. Banking and other financial clients need to obtain – and maintain – LEIs in order to trade globally, owing to regulations like MiFID/MiFIR in the EU, and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform & Consumer Protection Act in the US.

The use of LEIs also reduces the costs associated with customer onboarding, by standardising one all-encompassing identifier for KYC processes. McKinsey and Company worked with the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation to examine the potential LEI use cases for streamlining entity verification processes. They found found that "broad adoption of LEIs could yield annual savings of over U.S.$150 million within the investment banking industry”.

For these reasons the uptake of LEIs has tripled globally in the last two years, between September 2017 (550k LEIs issued) and September 2019 (1.5m LEIs issued to date). Despite such high growth rates, with an estimated 300m organisations worldwide, the LEI universe is just scratching the surface. As banks manage and rely on a large proportion of these identifiers, the need for effective LEI management is essential.

The platform is delivered through a SaaS portal as well as an API to enable same-session issuance for partner applications such as this FinTech use case from Neo Capital.