GLEIF Data Quality Management

The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) is responsible for monitoring and ensuring high quality LEI data. In cooperation with its partners in the Global LEI System, GLEIF focuses on further optimizing the quality, reliability and usability of LEI data, empowering market participants to benefit from the wealth of information available from the LEI population. The GLEIF data quality management framework ensures that the LEI remains the industry standard best suited to providing open and reliable data for unique legal entity identification management.

Global LEI System Value Chain

The process of maintaining LEI data quality starts with the registering entity. Through self-registration, the entity must supply accurate legal entity reference data. It is then the responsibility of the LEI issuing organization to verify this data with the local authoritative source - a national Business Register, for example - and issue an LEI compliant with the LEI standards.

Once a legal entity has obtained an LEI, it will be published together with the related legal entity reference data by the LEI issuing organization. Data quality is also ensured via the annual LEI renewal process. While the legal entity is required to notify the managing LEI issuing organization when changes occur to its reference data, the renewal process ensures that, at a minimum, the legal entity and the LEI issuing organization review and re-validate the legal entity reference data annually.

Each LEI issuer publishes a file including their entire managed population of LEI records on a daily basis. The Common Data File Formats define the established standard of how LEI issuing organizations report their managed LEI data. GLEIF collects the data provided and publishes daily the Concatenated Files and Golden Copy and Delta Files.

Data Quality Gates

Based on Deming’s cycle of continuous improvement each data quality step of GLEIF’s framework is performed through assigned quality gates.

Before an LEI Record Set is published, the reference data is sent to GLEIF’s Check for Duplicates and Data Governance Pre-Check facilities. These two facilities represent the first Quality Gate and ensure that potential faulty data and duplicates are identified and inconsistencies are remediated before the data enters the Global LEI System. The subsequent second Quality Gate guarantees that the files are compliant with the current technical standard and the Common Data File formats expressed in an XML Schema.

Once the data has been published, it will be examined by GLEIF’s automated Data Quality Checks on a daily basis. To continuously improve the GLEIF data quality management program, the checks are refined on an ongoing basis.

The results of the Data Quality Checks are monitored in Quality Gates 4 and 5. The Data Quality Dashboard enables interactive insights into each LEI Record’s data quality, while the Data Quality Reports provide the public with a monthly overview of the data quality performance on a global and LEI Issuer level.

GLEIF’s Challenge Management facility allows anyone with a form of proof to create a data challenge against an LEI Record. These challenges are then forwarded to the LEI Issuers who decide in collaboration with the legal entity whether the reference data needs to be adjusted.