Regulators focus on LEIs in derivatives reporting push

Industry and regulators have made progress towards an ambitious global system of unique identifiers that could help avert future crises – but there is still a lot to debate, and time is running out

Regulators have a vision of the future in which vast reservoirs of swap market data lie at their fingertips – information that can be filtered to help identify dangerous build-ups of risk. But getting to that point requires each market participant to be given its own unique tag – of which there could eventually be more than a million, according to one estimate – and attempts to create a system of legal entity identifiers (LEIs) have foundered in the past.

Those involved in the current effort say