Bloomberg’s accreditation as a Local Operating Unit (LOU) that can issue Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs) as prescribed by the Global LEI Foundation (GLEIF) is bang on strategy for the company as it continues to promote open symbology and push its Financial Instrument Global Identifier (FIGI) towards ISO standardisation. Following the company’s accreditation as an LOU earlier this month, we caught up with Steve Meizanis, head of entity content management at Bloomberg, to see what this will mean for the company and its clients.

Meizanis says the LOU accreditation process took towards a year, with entities now being able to apply for LEIs from the Bloomberg LOU website, lei.bloomberg.com, the company’s Entity Exchange platform, which supports the exchange of data and documents related to trading accounts, and from the Bloomberg terminal using LEI.

Commenting on the company’s LEI offer, Meizanis says: “We offer a competitive cost structure for LEIs, which compares favourably to other issuers, and have excellent quality controls in place to authenticate and verify entity data. Our clients can make their workflows more efficient as they can apply for LEIs from the Bloomberg platform. We can also help them get LEIs for their counterparties, which provides more efficiencies. We can help firms that are not Blomberg clients to map LEIs to their systems.”

In terms of strategy, LOU accreditation fits well into Blomberg’s commitment to open standards such as the LEI and the FIGI, which is based on the company’s open symbology and is, in essence, a renamed BBGID Bloomberg identifier.

Meizanis says LOU accreditation is an extension of what Bloomberg already does and is in line with the company’s perspective that open source entity identifiers should be free. The company is pushing the FIGI through the ISO standardisation process with support from the Object Management Group, leading Meizanis to suggest that it could ultimately complement the ISIN instrument standard.