The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (Gleif) is calling on financial institutions to take on a new 'validation agent' role within the global LEI system.
The global LEI project aims to ensure that every counterparty in a financial transaction is issued a unique code so that those transactions can be fully tracked across borders.
Gleif is calling on firms to tap their KYC, AML and other 'business-as-usual' onboarding processes as validation agents to obtain LEIs for their customers when verifying their identities during onboarding and refresh updates.
By becoming validation agents, Gleif says that FIs can spare their clients from labour intensive duplicative processes and deliver a faster and more convenient customer experience.
The agents themselves also benefit by boosting their internal data management capabilities and reducing costs. It also paves the way for FIs to expand their usage of the LEI beyond capital markets to encompass all banking business lines, which Gleif claims could save the industry $2-4 billion annually in client onboarding costs alone.
Stephan Wolf, CEO, Gleif, says: "The Validation Agent role helps financial institutions to improve their operations and enable their customers to more quickly achieve their desired financial transactions.
"By becoming Validation Agents financial institutions can streamline, accelerate and diversify their use of the LEI, and ensure their autonomy as they look to digitize their business processes."