MiFID II requires that investment firms provide reports which use Legal Entity Identifiers (LEI) as codes for counterparties. At this stage, many counterparties have not yet obtained LEIs, which will lead to an issue when reporting.

GLEIF, the Global LEI Foundation, have now introduced the concept of a “registration agent”, where an entity may help others to obtain an LEI. The concept is described here on GLEIF’s web site. Agent status  allows an entity to help their client obtain an LEI and handle the process for them.

The concept of the registration agent is alluded to in the Q+A document on MiFID data reporting, which was recently updated and can be found here.