GLEIF Opens Mumbai Office to Support Continued Widespread LEI Adoption in India

22 October 2024 – Basel – The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF), headquartered in Switzerland, has opened an office in Mumbai, India. The organization is expanding its ‘on-the-ground’ presence to gain deeper insights into local market dynamics and to provide enhanced support to regional authorities, businesses, and other Global LEI System stakeholders as demand for Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs) continues to escalate across the Indian subcontinent.

 In Q3 2023, India became one of the top jurisdictions with the highest LEI growth rate globally, a position it currently retains. It has been among the top five LEI growth jurisdictions since 2020 and is also one of the leading markets worldwide for LEI renewals.

 The LEI has become a key tool in enabling trust and transparency across the Indian financial ecosystem, thanks to a proactive regulatory agenda advanced by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Significant levels of new LEI issuance in the region annually, as well as high levels of LEI renewals, can be attributed directly to this extensive regulation and the need for organizations to comply.

Since 2017, LEI mandates covering the derivatives and non-derivatives markets, corporate borrowing, large value payments and cross-border transactions have been steadily introduced by RBI. The Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) have also since mandated or required the LEI for various KYC activities, to enhance transparency and track the financial exposure of an entity.

Furthermore, an RBI report titled ‘Payments Vision 2025’, published in 2022, outlined the LEI’s role in enabling secure, convenient and accessible payments. It details the RBI’s ambition to broaden the scope, usage and relevance of the LEI in all payment activities.

GLEIF’s CEO, Alexandre Kech, comments: “Building closer engagement with key markets globally is part of GLEIF’s strategy to ease and support LEI adoption, with the broader aim of hardwiring trust into every business relationship. LEI deployment in India is flourishing right now, thanks to regulation which has made the LEI foundational to trust across the economy. This makes it a relevant and compelling time to expand GLEIF’s near-at-hand presence within the region.

In addition to supporting business-as-usual LEI deployment, we also want to spread awareness of the trust and transparency that the LEI – and its digital counterpart, the verifiable LEI (vLEI) – can bring to all forms of digital identity management ecosystems. GLEIF’s combined organizational identity offering can fuel innovation, evolution and transformation across all sectors and beyond mandates. With so many Indian organizations now in possession of an LEI, we aim to help the market to optimize the many valuable opportunities to derive much broader value from it, beyond compliance with mandates.”

The establishment of the new office, overseen by Vikas Panwar, GLEIF’s Country Business Manager – India, is strategically designed to bolster GLEIF’s capacity to actively engage and collaborate directly with Indian LEI stakeholders and regulators at a localized level. Its primary objective is to provide comprehensive awareness on the extended utility of LEIs beyond regulatory compliance. Furthermore, GLEIF’s in-country team will spearhead pilot programs aimed at demonstrating the efficacy of LEIs in identity management initiatives across diverse industry verticals and sectors.

There is a strong and established LEI issuance ecosystem in India, with two local LEI issuers and two Validation Agents already serving the market: Legal Entity Identifier India Ltd., National Securities Depository Limited, Rubix Data Sciences and MNS Credit Management, respectively. 

GLEIF’s Mumbai office is its third in the APAC region. The first Asian office to open was in the Chiyoda Ward of Tokyo in late 2021, and this was followed in 2023 by the launch of an office in Singapore. GLEIF now has six offices worldwide, across Europe, North America and Asia, ensuring strong local representation in key countries globally.