--- title: "LEI (Legal Entity Identifier)" summary: "The LEI is a 20-character ISO 17442 code identifying a legal entity that participates in financial transactions, issued through the Global LEI Foundation and published as open reference data." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/glossary/lei last_updated: 2026-10-15 copy: full --- # LEI (Legal Entity Identifier) > The LEI is a 20-character ISO 17442 code identifying a legal entity that participates in financial transactions, issued through the Global LEI Foundation and published as open reference data. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/glossary/lei Last updated: 2026-10-15 Glossary · Identifiers ## How to read this The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. [Filed under identifiers](https://entitybind.com/glossary#identifiers). By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 15 October 2026 ## What LEI (Legal Entity Identifier) means The LEI is a 20-character code that names one legal entity, published together with its reference data as open data. It came out of the 2008 financial crisis: regulators found that nobody could aggregate exposure to a counterparty across markets, because no shared key existed. It is issued by accredited Local Operating Units under [GLEIF's governance](https://www.gleif.org/en/organizational-identity/lei-vlei/the-legal-entity-identifier-lei), and the reference data — legal name, registered address, legal form, registration authority, parent relationships — is published openly and free of charge. It is the strongest identifier available in company data for one structural reason: the body publishing the record is the body that assigns the identifier, so the mapping between the code and the entity is authoritative by construction rather than inferred. The relationship data is unusually valuable too, since direct and ultimate parents are reported against the standard. Its limitation is coverage. An LEI exists where an entity needed one — typically for financial market activity or a reporting obligation — so most of any national register has none. An LEI is decisive when present and absent for the majority of companies in a typical supplier master. Entity Bind treats an agreeing LEI as a deterministic identifier rule that decides on its own, subject to a name sanity check, at one credit and no model spend. Records arriving with an identifier of this kind resolved at 100% (317/317) on the representative fixture of 2026-08-29. ### Sources - [GLEIF, “The Legal Entity Identifier (LEI)”](https://www.gleif.org/en/organizational-identity/lei-vlei/the-legal-entity-identifier-lei): The operator of the system, describing the twenty-character code and the four ISO 17442 principles it adheres to. It is GLEIF's account of the standard rather than the standard's own text. - [CC0 1.0 Universal](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/): The dedication GLEIF publishes the LEI records under. Nothing is conditional on attribution, which is why that material can be stored and resold. ## Where this shows up in Entity Bind Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price. - [Legal Entity Identifier (LEI)](https://entitybind.com/identifiers/lei): One legal entity: the party that can enter a contract, not a brand, a division, a trading name or a group. A subsidiary with its own legal personality holds its own LEI… - [Reference data](https://entitybind.com/use-cases/reference-data): Identifier crosswalks, where each fact came from, and what a cited fact has to carry to be usable downstream. - [Compared with LSEG PermID](https://entitybind.com/compare/lseg-permid): An open identifier scheme for financial entities, and what a permanent identifier does and does not settle. The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## The terms next to this one Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one. - [Company number](https://entitybind.com/glossary/company-number): A company number is the identifier a register assigns to a company at incorporation, and it is unique only within the register that issued it — never within a country and never globally. - [Crosswalk](https://entitybind.com/glossary/crosswalk): A crosswalk is a mapping between the identifier schemes that name the same company in different systems — LEI to company number to CIK to ticker — so that data joined on one key can be joined to data keyed on another. - [Deterministic matching](https://entitybind.com/glossary/deterministic-matching): Deterministic matching decides a pair by an explicit rule — usually agreement on a strong identifier — and produces the same verdict every time with no score in between. - [Reference data](https://entitybind.com/glossary/reference-data): Reference data is the slow-changing, externally defined data used to classify and identify things — registers, code lists, identifier schemes — as opposed to the transactional data that refers to it. - [EUID (European Unique Identifier)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/euid): The EUID is the identifier assigned under the EU Business Registers Interconnection System, combining a country code, a register code and the national registration number into one pan-European key. ### Answered at length elsewhere - [What is an LEI?](https://entitybind.com/guides/what-is-an-lei) (Guide): The Legal Entity Identifier explained: the twenty-character structure and its check digits, GLEIF and the LOUs, Level 1 and Level 2 data, annual renewal and lapse, and what a lapsed LEI means for matching. - [The DORA register of information](https://entitybind.com/guides/dora-register-of-information) (Guide): What the register demands, why only 6.5% of almost 1,000 dry-run registers passed all 116 data quality checks, and the provider identity problem that explains most of the failures. ## The other 8 terms on this shelf The keys company data is joined on, who issues each one, and where each stops being unique. - [Crosswalk](https://entitybind.com/glossary/crosswalk) - [Company number](https://entitybind.com/glossary/company-number) - [CIK (Central Index Key)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/cik) - [Ticker symbol](https://entitybind.com/glossary/ticker) - [SIREN and SIRET](https://entitybind.com/glossary/siren) - [D-U-N-S number](https://entitybind.com/glossary/duns) - [EUID (European Unique Identifier)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/euid) - [VAT number](https://entitybind.com/glossary/vat-number) Previous, alphabetically: [Last confirmed](https://entitybind.com/glossary/last-confirmed) · Next, alphabetically: [Licence tier](https://entitybind.com/glossary/licence-tier) ## Evidence basis Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. ## Start with your own company records. Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [All 64 terms](https://entitybind.com/glossary) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). --- Historical results on an internal UK fixture with a preloaded catalogue. The September 5 replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot establish current calibration. No independent customer holdout or global coverage claim. Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/glossary/lei, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.