Gleif and OpenCorporates Expand Partnership to Increase Legal Entity Transparency in Global Markets

LEI-mapping capability enhanced as LEI data links to corresponding records in OpenCorporates database

18 April 2023 – Basel – The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) has announced that LEIs have been linked with corresponding records in OpenCorporates’ global database of legal-entity data, thanks to an expansion of a long-standing partnership between the two organizations. OpenCorporates is the largest open database of companies in the world.

Both organizations are uniquely focused on ensuring that open and reliable entity reference data is publicly available to promote transparency and increase trust in the business environment and simplify and reduce the cost of customer and third-party management. Open, public, high quality, and electronically accessible company data is critical to address the hidden risks in financial markets and global supply chains, as well as tackling money laundering and the criminal use of companies, particularly as business operations become more automated.

Data users, including financial institutions, government agencies, and companies, will benefit significantly from these complementary datasets being linked. With LEIs now natively available in the OpenCorporates database, cross-referencing between these two datasets will facilitate a wide range of compliance, surveillance, and due-diligence monitoring processes.

The collaboration delivers the following benefits to global data consumers:

• Extended information about businesses. Data users can leverage the LEI to seamlessly connect to the OpenCorporates dataset and vice versa. LEI data answers the question of ‘who owns who’, including verified parent and subsidiary relationships, while the OpenCorporates database of corporate registry records contains foundational company information, such as current status, named directors, and industry codes.
• Streamlined data management. The addition of the LEI to the identifiers held in the OpenCorporates database, alongside the addition of OpenCorporates to a growing number of other identifiers already mapped to the LEI, helps to streamline entity reconciliation processes and in turn reduce data-management costs.
• More effective and efficient risk analysis. Understanding a group’s corporate structure from verified LEI data, together with access to a richer linked dataset, supports a variety of other risk requirements, such as counterparty exposure, for example.
• Easy integration of wider datasets. Many wider datasets already utilize either the OpenCorporates or LEI identifiers (such as the OECD-UNSD Multinational Enterprise Information Platform or wider supply chain, beneficial ownership, sanctions, and many Know-Your-Customer and anti-financial crime platforms). This collaboration will allow commercial organizations, fintech firms and those working for the public benefit to increase innovation and insights by joining data together.

“This latest collaboration with OpenCorporates will bring greater transparency and identity management efficiencies for millions of data consumers globally,” comments Stephan Wolf, CEO at GLEIF. “The LEI is the linchpin that connects the dots across a universe of entity identification. To play this role, interoperability with parallel identity platforms is crucial. Connecting with the OpenCorporates database helps ensure that the highest quality reference data is quickly and easily available to all.”

Chris Taggart, CEO at OpenCorporates said: “GLEIF and OpenCorporates share a common purpose: to create a fairer, more prosperous, and sustainable society by improving corporate transparency with trusted legal entity information. Following many years of successful collaboration, we are proud to broaden the scope of our relationship with GLEIF. With more detailed information available to anyone who requires it, global organizations will be better equipped to tackle corruption and criminality and create a more trusted business environment.”

GLEIF will publish open-source relationship files bi-weekly, in a CSV format, which will map LEIs to their corresponding records in OpenCorporates’ database. Mapped data will also be incorporated into the LEI Search and GLEIF API at a later stage. More than 50 percent of the global LEI population is now linked to the OpenCorporates database (given not all legal entities with LEIs are officially registered – e.g., funds).

In addition to providing OpenCorporates to LEI mapping, GLEIF has also certified mapping relationships between S&P Global’s Company ID, SWIFT’s Market Identifier Code (MIC) and Business Identifier Code (BIC), and the Association of National Numbering Agencies’ (ANNA) International Securities Identification Numbers (ISIN).

Founded in 2010, OpenCorporates has been instrumental in opening access to corporate registries across Europe and North America and making trusted primary-source legal-entity data openly available as a single standardized dataset which now covers 220 million companies across 145 jurisdictions worldwide.

OpenCorporates has a long history with GLEIF; Chris Taggart, OpenCorporates’ founder, was on the inaugural GLEIF Board of Directors. In 2019, the two organizations signed a Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate on legal entity data, and since then OpenCorporates’ data has been used to support the GLEIF data quality program, including the automation of data quality checks and referrals of challenges to LEI issuing operations.

GLEIF encourages further engagement with its Certification of LEI Mapping service, which is available to interested data vendors and other organizations free of charge. GLEIF is already working with its Vendor Relationship Stakeholder Group to advance its mapping program objectives.