The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) has welcomed Sparkasse Bank Malta and Diligencia as validation agents.
With the addition of these two firms, the number of GLEIF validation agents reaches 10 globally — spanning Africa, China, Europe, India, the Middle East and North America.
GLEIF introduced the Validation Agent Framework in September 2020, to enable banks and other regulated institutions to leverage their Know Your Client (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) onboarding procedures to help their clients obtain LEIs.
According to the organisation, validation agents can utilise the LEI to accelerate their internal digital transformation for customer onboarding, payments and other transactions and contract signing.
GLEIF CEO Stephan Wolf says that the processes are similar for obtaining an LEI and customer onboarding to a financial or regulated institution. A raft of information related to legal status and ownership structure, among other things, has to be provided and verified in both scenarios.
He adds: “By de-duplicating this process, validation agents can create efficiencies for themselves and their clients, while equipping their clients with the means of establishing trust with any other legal entity anywhere in the world, irrespective of language or location. Transparency and trust sit at the heart of good business practices.”
Paul Mifsud, managing director of Sparkasse Bank Malta, comments: “Our approval as a validation agent is a significant milestone. It enables us to streamline our approach to client lifecycle management, enhance our customer experience, and provides a uniquely powerful foundation to create new value-added services for our corporate clients.”
Sparkasse Bank Malta and Diligencia partnered with Ubisecure, a LEI issuer. Simon Wood, CEO of Ubisecure, says that GLEIF-approved validation agents are using Ubisecure's LEI Everywhere programme to streamline LEI issuance for client onboarding and refresh.
“We have worked closely with the GLEIF and our validation agent partners to develop the ideal solution — an API-first, automated platform that ensures validation agents can register LEIs without barriers or friction and at massive scale,” explains Wood.
“We are happy to support Validation Agents as they contribute to the widespread adoption of LEIs and help meet the GLEIF goal to place LEIs at the centre of modern, connected business.”
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