Legal Entity Identification for Financial Contracts

A Legal Entity Identifier (or LEI), is a 20-character identifier that identifies distinct legal entities that engage in financial transactions. It is defined by ISO 17442. The LEI is a global standard, designed to be non-proprietary data that is freely accessible to all. Over 435,000 legal entities from more than 195 countries have now been issued with LEIs.

The LEI system was developed by the G20, in response to the inability of financial institutions to identify organisations uniquely, so that their financial transactions in different national jurisdictions can be fully tracked. The first LEIs were issued in December 2012.

The technical specification for LEI is ISO 17442. An LEI consists of a 20-character alphanumeric string, with the first 4 characters identifying the Local Operating Unit (LOU) that issued the LEI. Characters 5 and 6 are reserved as '00'. Characters 7-18 are the unique alphanumeric string assigned to the organisation by the LOU. The final 2 characters are checksum digits.

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