What is an LEI?

The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation — GLEIF — operates the system, accredits the Local Operating Units that actually issue codes, and publishes the whole reference dataset. Global: roughly 3.4 million LEIs assigned across all registration statuses, about 2.0 million of them with registration status ISSUED and most of the rest LAPSED (GLEIF, golden copy of 2026-09-25). Authoritative by definition: the body that publishes the record is the body that assigns the code.

The publishing arrangement is the unusual part. GLEIF publishes the full record set under CC0, which means the data is genuinely open rather than open-with-a-clause, and it is the one source in our inventory that grades its own facts: every record carries a corroboration level, so an uncorroborated self-reported name can be demoted below a filed one rather than trusted equally. Almost no commercial dataset offers that, and it is the property that makes the LEI record usable as evidence rather than merely as a lookup.

It also happens to be where several other identifiers can be obtained lawfully. The GLEIF payload carries the issuing register's authority code with the number held in it, the ISO 20275 legal form code, BIC codes for financial institutions, and an OpenCorporates identifier — the last of which can therefore be used without touching OpenCorporates' own data or terms, because GLEIF publishes the mapping itself.

Level 2 is the relationship data, and it answers a narrower question than most people assume. It records the direct and ultimate accounting consolidating parent — the entity that consolidates this one in its financial statements under the applicable accounting standard — together with the parent's own LEI where the parent holds one.

Accounting consolidation is not majority ownership and the two frequently diverge. A company can be majority-owned and not consolidated; a company can be consolidated on control grounds without a majority stake. Rendering an LEI parent into a field called "parent company" alongside a credit bureau's ownership parent produces a column where two different claims are indistinguishable, and nobody looking at the resulting report can tell which one they are reading. Every ownership edge we return therefore states its basis and its certainty rather than being flattened into one field.

The absences are structured too. Where an entity reports no parent, it supplies a reason code — the parent has no LEI, the parent is one or more natural persons, there is no consolidating parent, and several others covering legal obstacles and non-public arrangements. Those codes are a finding rather than a gap: "the parent is a natural person" and "we do not know" are different states, and a system that renders both as an empty field has thrown away the useful half.

The coverage limit follows directly. Subsidiary lists derived from Level 2 are complete only with respect to entities that themselves hold an LEI, so an ownership walk that stops is reporting the edge of the identifier system rather than the edge of the group. We report what was not walked for exactly that reason: you cannot infer depth from an empty field.

The intuitive handling of a lapse is wrong, and it costs you recall on rows you could have matched.

A lapsed LEI is still that entity's LEI. The code was assigned to a legal entity and it continues to identify that legal entity; the lapse says the holder stopped paying for annual re-verification. So two records carrying the same lapsed LEI are the same legal entity, and a matcher that declines to use a lapsed identifier is discarding the strongest signal in the record because of an administrative fact about a subscription.

The correct handling separates three questions that the status field is often asked to answer at once. Is this the same entity — yes, the identifier still binds, and an agreeing LEI decides. Is the reference data attached to it current — no, treat the Level 1 name and address as of the last verification date rather than as of today, which matters most for address-sensitive work like structured payment addresses. Is the entity still trading — the LEI record does not answer that; the register of incorporation does, and that is a different lookup.

Two further rules follow. A lapse is never a non-match signal: two records with different LEIs are different entities whether or not either has lapsed, and two records with the same LEI are the same entity on the same terms. And a lapsed record's ownership data ages faster than its identity data — a consolidating parent recorded three years ago and never re-verified is a claim about 2023, and presenting it as a current group structure is the sort of quiet staleness a concentration report cannot survive.

It says nothing about whether an entity is trading, solvent, sanctioned, creditworthy or well governed. It is an identifier, and reading a status field as a risk signal is the same category error as reading a match confidence as a recommendation.

It does not identify branches or establishments in the way some registers do, it does not identify natural persons, and it does not identify securities. Where the entity you are trying to identify is a division, a site or a brand rather than a legal person, there is no LEI to find and its absence is not a data gap.

And it does not make the surrounding matching problem go away. An agreeing LEI decides a match on its own; a record that carries no LEI is exactly as hard as it was before, which for a name and a country is a shape that measured well on a high name-uniqueness register and would measure much worse on a low one. The identifier is the easy path, and the reason a resolver exists is the rows that do not have one.