The Financial Stability Board today released a report on how the Legal Entity Identifier—a unique alpha-numeric code that provides for identification of legal entities in a financial transaction—can be used in cross-border payments. FSB noted that the use of LEI in cross-border payments could help strengthen data standardization and facilitate faster, safer payments.
The report identified the main obstacles to broad LEI adoption as costs, legacy systems issues and a lack of perceived incentives for voluntary adoption of the LEI by market participants and end-users. It also offered several recommendations and options for improving adoption of the LEI in cross-border payments systems.