The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) has opened an office in Mumbai, India.
The organisation says it is expanding its presence to gain deeper insights into local market dynamics and to provide enhanced support to regional authorities, businesses, and other Global LEI System stakeholders.
The announcement comes as demand for legal entity identifiers (LEIs) continues to escalate across the Indian subcontinent, the foundation says.
"LEI deployment in India is flourishing right now, thanks to regulation which has made the LEI foundational to trust across the economy,” says Alexandre Kech, CEO of GLEIF.
“This makes it a relevant and compelling time to expand GLEIF's near-at-hand presence within the region.”
Vikas Panwar, GLEIF's country business manager for India, oversees the establishment of the new office, which is designed to allow GLEIF to actively engage and directly collaborate with Indian LEI stakeholders and regulators at a localised level.
Its primary objective is to provide comprehensive awareness of the extended utility of LEIs beyond regulatory compliance.
Furthermore, GLEIF's in-country team will spearhead pilot programmes aimed at demonstrating the efficacy of LEIs in identity management initiatives across diverse industry verticals and sectors.
Kech adds: “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 organisational identity offering can fuel innovation, evolution, and transformation across all sectors and beyond mandates. With so many Indian organisations now in possession of an LEI, we aim to help the market to optimise the many valuable opportunities to derive much broader value from it, beyond compliance with mandates."
There are two local LEI issuers and two validation agents already serving the Indian market — Legal Entity Identifier India, National Securities Depository, Rubix Data Sciences, and MNS Credit Management, respectively.
Since Q3 2023, India has been one of the major jurisdictions with the highest LEI growth rate globally, according to GLEIF.
The foundation attributes the “significant levels” of new LEI issuance in the region annually, as well as high levels of LEI renewals, to a “proactive” regulatory agenda, advanced by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), and the need for organisations to comply.
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 know-your-customer (KYC) activities to enhance transparency and track the financial exposure of an entity.
GLEIF's Mumbai office is its third in the APAC region, with the first Asian office opening in the Chiyoda Ward of Tokyo in late 2021, followed by Singapore in 2023.
GLEIF now has six offices worldwide, spread across Europe, North America, and Asia.
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