Basel – A collaboration between the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF), OS-Climate and Amazon has resulted in GLEIF’s real-time open Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) datasets being made publicly available for the first time in the cloud, via the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) data catalog. Building upon its long-standing relationship with ASDI, the move was driven by OS-Climate to allow easier integration of LEI data with its own datasets, which supports the development of open data and open-source analytics for climate risk management and climate-aligned finance and investment.
ASDI’s hosting capabilities simplify programmatic access to the LEI data, which connects unique entity identifiers to verified business reference data enabling clear and unique identification of legal entities participating in financial transactions. OS-Climate ingests and transforms this raw data into its Data Commons platform, which provides a streamlined architecture for building, sharing, and running data and analytics services for evaluating climate finance risks and opportunities, benefitting from significant efficiencies by doing so.
The new availability of LEI data within ASDI has the potential to deliver a much wider-reaching impact on the global sustainability ecosystem. By making large sustainability datasets publicly available to anyone, ASDI seeks to accelerates sustainability research and innovation by minimizing the cost and time required for data acquisition and analysis. The datasets can also be easily accessed by, and integrated with, other sustainability initiatives, to enhance data modelling, mapping, and calculations.
GLEIF CEO, Stephan Wolf, comments: “GLEIF fully supports the wider use of the LEI to deliver transparency and accountability in global sustainability use cases. In driving the recruitment of LEI datasets into ASDI, this collaboration not only extends and accelerates the use of LEIs in climate-aligned finance by delivering near-term efficiencies to the transformational work being undertaken by OS-Climate. It also acts as a catalyst for innovative LEI use in sustainability initiatives of the future, bringing with it the opportunity for LEIs to further their influence – as encouraged by the G20, the Financial Stability Board and regulators worldwide – as a tool of broad public good. GLEIF applauds OS-Climate for its leadership on this collaboration, the result of which has the power to help transform sustainability data aggregation and modelling for the good of everyone.”
OS-Climate Project Lead, Michael Tiemann, adds: “The world of corporate identities and relationships is dynamic and complex. One of the key goals of the OS-Climate project is to create a “one-stop shop” for data and analytics tools to enable breakthrough innovations in the area of climate-aligned finance. The LEI provides OS-Climate with an elegant and powerful architectural solution to this very challenging problem, and the programmatic availability of the dataset on ASDI simplifies our own data management and platform services model greatly.”
“The science is clear: our world must make rapid progress toward a net-zero carbon future and making critical climate data accessible to everyone will be important to our progress,” said Ana Pinheiro Privette, Lead for ASDI. “Sharing Legal Entity Identifier data alongside other important data assets like carbon emissions and climate projections will help users all over the world streamline processes to support environmentally-friendly investments, make sustainable financial decisions and lead to faster innovation.”
Supporting quotes
Rim Tehraoui, BNP Paribas Group Chief Data Officer comments: “Entity Matching is key to link the physical world with the financial world. BNP Paribas are open sourcing an Entity Matching library that will match ESG data from various sources with the LEI company referential. We are also using the LEI to navigate company hierarchies, which supports efforts to link ESG data to securities.”
Udo Riese, Global Head of ESG for Allianz Investment Management comments: “Legal Entity Identifiers are at the core of investment data. Transparent, reliable, and up-to-date information on “who is who” and “who owns whom” is of utmost importance for investors. Having a single LEI reference dataset makes it possible for Allianz to reliably connect asset and market data with a growing range of analytic and forecasting systems necessary for making sound investment decisions.”
COP26
On November 8th, OS-Climate will host an in-person event in Glasgow, Scotland, where they will present a number of new open-source initiates that highlight GLEIF data integration. This will include a preview of the Data Commons, as well as an Implied Temperature Rise Tool for aligning investment and loan portfolios with Paris Accord targets, and a Physical Risk Tool for analyzing vulnerability to extreme heat, flood, drought, and other extreme threats and for enabling investments in resilience. GLEIF will be highlighted a is a crucial enabler of the OS-Climate Platform. PRI CEO Fiona Reynolds and UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance Mark Carney will open the event, with speakers including former US Federal Reserve Board Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin, Airbus EVP Catherine Jestin, and BNY International Chair Hani Kablawi.
