The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) has collaborated with Sociovestix Labs to create a machine learning tool that recognizes an entity’s specific legal form and automates the assignment of its corresponding Entity Legal Form (ELF) code.
The ‘Entity Legal Forms (ELF) Code List’ is based on the ISO standard 20275 ‘Financial Services – Entity Legal Forms (ELF)’ and assigns a unique alpha-numeric code of four characters to each entity legal form.
As explained in the company press release, the variety of entity legal forms that exist within and between jurisdictions has made it difficult for large organisations to capture legal form as structured data. The new tool, trained on GLEIF’s Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) database of over two million records, will allow banks, investment firms, corporations, governments, and other large organisations to retrospectively analyse their master data, extract the legal form from the unstructured text of the legal name and uniformly apply an ELF code to each entity type, according to the ISO 20275 standard.
J.P. Morgan, has successfully tested the new tool and is currently evaluating its integration in its data pipeline.
The tool delivers a wide range of benefits to organisations, along with the broader global marketplace. These include:
Automating the standardisation of unstructured data (entity legal form as part of the organization’s name), fostering greater data quality.
Overcoming legal form data classification problems stemming from, for example, language variations and abbreviation inconsistencies and promoting greater insight and transparency into the global marketplace.
Presenting the legal form of an entity in a machine-readable format which can be utilized by AI tools and in other digitized business processes and applications.
Bypassing the risks and limitations associated with manual engagement with data, including time, inefficiency, human error, and high administrative costs.
By creating richer data sets with improved categorization of legal entities, the new tool promotes greater insight and transparency into the global marketplace and works in tandem with the LEI to create a globally consistent data set.
The ‘Entity Legal Forms (ELF) Code List’ contains more than 3,250 Entity Legal Form codes spanning more than 175 jurisdictions, including legal forms and types in their native language, such as limited liability companies, Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung or Société Anonyme. GLEIF has integrated ELF codes into the standardised set of reference data on a legal entity available within the Global LEI Index, an open data set.
The tool has been used to retrospectively apply these codes to LEI records where they were absent. The inclusion of ELF codes within LEI data further enhances the business card information included in each of the more than two million LEIs used globally today.
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