As told in the post Business Entity Identifiers there has been a new global numbering system for business entities on the way for some time. The wonder is called LEI (Legal Entity Identifier).
The implementation work has been adapted by the Financial Stability Board. The latest developments are reported in a publication called Fifth progress note on the Global LEI Initiative.
Surely, while the implementations may be in good hands, the set up doesn’t give hope for a speedy process where every legal entity in the world in a short time will have a LEI.
And then the next question will be how long it will take before organizations will have enriched existing databases with that LEI and implemented on-boarding processes where a LEI is captured with every new insertion of party master data describing a legal entity.
A good way to start to be prepared will be to implement features in on-boarding business processes where available external reference data are captured when new party entities are added to your databases. Having best available information about names, addresses and business entity identifiers available today and a culture of capturing such information will be a great starting point.
And oh, the instant Data Quality concept is precisely all about doing that.