LEI Regulations

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The LEI is a regulatory instrument before it is anything else. More than 250 regulations, rules and official guidelines worldwide reference the Legal Entity Identifier, making it the most widely used entity identifier in financial regulation. This page lists them, searchable by country and rule, with the newest requirements first. If a bank, broker, regulator or counterparty has asked your entity for an LEI, the rule behind the request is on this page.

The system behind the identifier is regulatory too. The LEI was created on a G20 mandate after the 2008 crisis, when regulators could not reliably identify who was connected to whom. It is overseen by the LEI Regulatory Oversight Committee (LEI ROC), a body of more than 70 public authorities, central banks, securities regulators and finance ministries from over 50 jurisdictions, with GLEIF operating the system under its oversight. When a regulation names the LEI, it is naming an identifier that regulators themselves govern. That is why it keeps appearing in new rules, and why no private or commercial identifier does.

Recently in force

The requirements that changed most recently, and the ones most likely to be behind a new LEI request in 2026.

Who has mandated it

LEI requirements are law in every major financial centre. The European Union and United Kingdom will not let an entity trade reportable instruments without one. The United States requires it across swap, fund and bank reporting. India requires it for large-value payments, borrowing and cross-border transactions. Canada, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, Japan, Mexico and Turkey mandate it in transaction reporting.

For jurisdictions without a domestic mandate, the mandate arrives through the counterparty. A Cayman or BVI fund has no local LEI rule, and needs an LEI anyway: the moment it trades with an EU or UK investment firm, MiFIR and EMIR reporting require its identifier before the trade can happen; a US swap dealer needs it under CFTC rules; its EU service providers now need it under DORA. Offshore entities are already inside the system through everyone else's regulations. The only question a financial centre without a mandate faces is whether its entities are identified on its own terms or on its counterparties'.

Focus: FATF Recommendation 16, payments and crypto

The most consequential recent development for the LEI sits outside any single jurisdiction. In 2025 the Financial Action Task Force adopted a revised Recommendation 16, renamed from "wire transfers" to payment transparency, the global standard behind what the industry calls the travel rule: the requirement that basic originator and beneficiary information travels with every payment.

The revision does something the previous text never did. It distinguishes between people and legal entities, and for legal entities it names the identifiers. The full text sits in the FATF Recommendations (PDF), Recommendation 16 and its Interpretive Note. For qualifying payments, the information accompanying the transfer should include, for a legal person:

The practical meaning: as jurisdictions implement the revised standard, phased alongside the ISO 20022 migration toward 2030, the LEI becomes a recognised way to identify companies inside payment messages themselves, not just in post-trade reports. GLEIF's commentary on the revision describes the LEI as the key identifier for legal persons in qualifying transactions, enabling digital retrieval of a counterparty's verified name and address and precise matching for beneficiary verification, the same mechanism the EU's Instant Payments Regulation permits as an alternative to name-matching in Verification of Payee.

The crypto extension

Recommendation 16 applies to virtual asset service providers through FATF's travel rule guidance, and the same identification logic is arriving in crypto regulation directly. Under the EU's MiCA framework and the recast Transfer of Funds Regulation, crypto-asset service providers are identified by LEI and originator and beneficiary information must accompany crypto transfers. In the United States, the CFTC's Market Risk Advisory Committee recommended in December 2024 that US regulators expand LEI use across reporting regimes, and the 2025 GENIUS Act created a federal framework for payment stablecoin issuers in which reliable issuer identification is a supervisory requirement, the role the LEI already performs in every comparable regime. For a regulated crypto firm the direction is uniform: the entity behind the wallet, the issuance or the service must be identifiable by a standard code, everywhere it operates.

Every LEI regulation, searchable

Filter by jurisdiction or search by rule, and click any column heading to sort. Required means the rule cannot be complied with without an LEI. Requested means the LEI is asked for where it exists. Based on the regulatory texts and GLEIF's regulatory-use records; dates are the year the LEI provision took effect.

Why regulators keep choosing it, in ESMA's words on the DORA register of information:

The table above groups requirements by parent regulation. The downloadable list itemises every implementing regulation, technical standard and circular that references the LEI, including proposed measures.

Regulation guides

Frequently asked questions