The LEI in Numbers: Demand Grows for the LEI to Bolster Operational Resilience
Growing adoption of the LEI reflects its role as a critical enabler of cyber resiliency and trust in financial services and beyond.
Author: Alexandre Kech
Date: 2025-04-24
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The Global LEI Foundation (GLEIF) is proud of its ongoing transparency initiatives, including its open approach to providing unrestricted access to the latest LEI data from around the world with the Quarterly LEI System Business Reports, which are made publicly available free of charge. Through this ‘LEI in Numbers’ blog series, GLEIF aims to highlight key data from the latest report, explaining trends and profiling successes from the global LEI rollout.
The latest report for Q1 2025 highlighted strong growth across the Global LEI System. Over 92,000 LEIs were issued globally during the quarter to take the total active LEI population past 2.71 million, representing a robust quarterly growth rate of 3.5%.
Overall growth in LEI adoption in Q1 was bolstered by initial implementations of the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).
DORA aims to strengthen financial entities' operational resilience by improving their ability to manage ICT-related risks. Identifying the ICT service providers that financial entities use to deliver critical functions is key to managing such risks. The regulation outlines that financial institutions must identify all EU-registered ICT service providers using an active LEI or European Unique Identifier (EUID) to achieve this. The LEI is mandated as the sole identifier for organizations registered outside the EU.
Demonstrable momentum for the LEI reflects widespread recognition of the importance of standardized, verifiable organizational identification and the benefits of consistent and unambiguous identification of entities across borders. These points point to the LEI as a critical enabler of cyber resiliency and trust across all global digital ecosystems.
At an individual jurisdiction level, the top growth rates were seen in Latvia (15.6%), India (11.7%), Lithuania (7.9%), Romania (6.5%), and Thailand (5.6%). Growth in the Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania was primarily driven by initial implementations of DORA. Sustained growth in India comes amid the culmination of the phase-wise introduction of the LEI for all large corporate borrowers of banks. This means all entities with exposure totaling ₹ five crore or more must have an LEI to be granted renewal or enhancement of credit facilities after 30 April 2025, which extends the requirement to India’s significant and vibrant SME community.
Elsewhere, growth in Thailand was driven primarily by the market activities of local LEI issuers.
Sustained increase in renewals continues
The overall LEI renewal rate in Q1 increased to 56.3%, with renewals remaining level in EU jurisdictions at 62% and rising in non-EU jurisdictions to 47.1%. Japan had the highest renewal rate overall (91.3%), followed by Finland (83.3%), India (78.9%), Germany (76.5%), and Liechtenstein (73.4%).
The ongoing increase in LEI renewals follows the introduction of the Policy Conformity Flag in Q1 2024, which was launched to make it clear to global data users whether an LEI record is up-to-date and complete with relationship reporting. Further initiatives are planned in 2025 by the Regulatory Oversight Committee (ROC) and GLEIF to continue encouraging renewals and promoting current, complete data reporting by legal entities, bolstering trust and transparency across the global economy.
Regarding the ROC's policies on LEI data formats first introduced in March 2022, approximately 6,300 entities were identified as government entities and 71 as international organizations (up from 5,800 and 68 in Q4 2024 respectively). Approximately 145,000 legal entities reported fund relationship structures, an increase of around 3,000 on the previous quarter.
For the full report, which includes further detail on the status of LEI issuance and growth potential, the level of competition between LEI issuing organizations in the Global LEI System, and Level 1 and 2 reference data, please visit the Global LEI System Business Reports page.
If you are interested in reviewing the latest daily LEI data, our Global LEI System Statistics Dashboard contains daily statistics on the total and active number of LEIs issued. This feature now enables any user to review historical data by geography, increasing transparency on the overall progress of the LEI.
For further details or to access historical data, please visit the Global LEI System Business Report Archive. We look forward to sharing our progress each quarter as we continue to drive LEI adoption in 2025.
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Alexandre Kech is the CEO of the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF).
Prior to joining GLEIF, Alexandre Kech was Head of Digital Securities at the SIX Digital Exchange. As a member of the Executive Board, Alex had full executive responsibility for the Digital Securities business vertical, including sales and relationship management, product development, business design, and ecosystem expansion.
Over the past 25 years, Alex has constructed a unique career combining finance at BNY Mellon, payments/securities infrastructure and standards at SWIFT, and blockchain and digital assets at Onchain Custodian (ONC) and, most recently, Citi Ventures. As co-founder and CEO of ONC, Alex led the Singapore and Shanghai-based team that built custody and prime brokerage services for crypto and other digital assets from scratch. As Blockchain & Digital Asset director at Citi Ventures, he built a team to engage the European ecosystem on emerging use cases for blockchain technologies and digital assets.
Alex is also involved in industry and standardization initiatives. As the convenor of the ISO TC 68 / SC8 / WG3, which produced the ISO 24165 Digital Token Identifier (DTI), he is a member of the DTI Foundation Product Advisory Committee. He also recently served as co-chair of the Global Digital Finance (gdf.io) custody working group.
Alex earned a bachelor’s degree in translation and an Executive MBA from the Quantic School of Business and Technology while building Onchain Custodian, putting theory into practice in real-time.
