The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the EU’s financial markets regulator and supervisor, today published the results of the survey conducted last October on legal entities identifiers.
The survey gathered evidence on the impacts of including alternatives for reporting, disclosure or record keeping requirements.
The results show:
- strong engagement of the industry on the topic (136 respondents),
- very high costs associated with gearing the reporting systems of financial firms towards additional identifiers (on average 360k Euros per firm and with a median of 40k Euros),
- an overwhelming preference for the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) as the legal entity identifier for reporting (86% of respondents), and
- pan-EU associations making constructive suggestions to improve EUID automation and its interoperability with LEI to reduce the burden and avoid duplications.
The full results can be found here while detailed results from consenting respondents can be found here.
This publication aligns with ESMA’s Data Strategy 2023-2028 by focusing on consistency of data standards across the various reporting frameworks. The approach aims to promote cost-efficient reporting and to explore, with the relevant stakeholders, opportunities to reduce the reporting burden.
Background
The ESMA survey on legal entity identifiers was launched on 18 October 2024, following the publication of the ESAs opinion on identification of ICT third party providers in DORA. The objective of the survey was to collect feedback from market participants on the opportunities and challenges, costs and benefits, of using different identifiers (other than the LEI) in future financial reporting more broadly.
Next steps
ESMA will organise a follow up workshop with the respondents to the survey and other invited stakeholders to further socialise the results and discuss possible future actions.
