What is a LEI? (GLEIF, explained)

Why a global identifier exists at all

National registration numbers only make sense within their own country and register - the same company might have no equivalent identifier that means anything outside its home jurisdiction. An LEI exists specifically to identify a legal entity unambiguously across borders and systems, originally driven by financial-market reporting requirements after the 2008 financial crisis made it clear regulators often couldn't reliably tell which entities in different jurisdictions were actually the same counterparty.

What LEI data actually contains

Beyond the identifier itself, an LEI record carries the entity's legal name, registered address, legal form, and - where filed - a "Level 2" accounting parent relationship: the entity that consolidates this one into its own financial statements under applicable accounting standards.

An accounting parent is not the same claim as a beneficial owner

This is the distinction worth being precise about. A GLEIF accounting-parent relationship is a real, verifiable signal - but it's a consolidation relationship, not a percentage-based ownership figure, and it never names a natural person. Keizu's resolution engine treats it accordingly: as a consolidation link, which caps everything beneath it as an upper-bound estimate rather than merging it with an exact ownership percentage. See how Keizu determines a UBO for exactly how that distinction is applied.

GLEIF in Keizu's coverage

GLEIF is one of the most thoroughly verified data sources in Keizu's coverage - checked directly against live responses from GLEIF's own API during development, not built against documentation alone. See Coverage for its current status alongside every other register.