If you work in banking compliance, KYC, or AML, this scenario is painfully familiar:
"We need to verify the LEI status for all 400 counterparties in this spreadsheet before Monday."
So someone opens a browser, goes to the GLEIF portal, pastes LEI #1, copies the status, pastes it back into Excel, moves to row 2... and keeps going for the next three hours.
This is not a niche problem. It happens weekly at banks, asset managers, and financial institutions worldwide.
What Is an LEI — and Why Does It Have to Be Validated?
A Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) is a 20-character global ID that uniquely identifies a legal entity in financial transactions. Under regulations like MiFID II, EMIR, and Basel III, institutions must confirm that every counterparty LEI is:
- Registered with GLEIF (the global LEI foundation)
- In ACTIVE status — not lapsed or retired
- Renewed on time (Next Renewal Date not overdue)
A lapsed LEI in your books means reporting failures, failed trades, and potential regulatory penalties. Checking them is not optional. But the way most teams do it today is completely broken.
The Real Cost of Manual LEI Validation
Let's put numbers on it.
| Scenario | Time per LEI | 200 LEIs |
|---|---|---|
| Manual portal lookup | ~2 min | ~7 hours |
| One-by-one scripting | ~30 sec | ~1.5 hours |
| FindLEI batch run | ~2 sec | ~7 minutes |
Note: The current API specification supports up to 200 LEI codes per uploaded file. Each document you upload is processed as a single batch run of up to 200 records.
Beyond time, manual processes introduce:
Copy-paste errors (transposed characters, wrong row)
Inconsistent column formats (date formats, status labels)
No audit trail of when validations were run
Analyst burnout from mindless repetitive work
FindLEI: Batch LEI Validation, Built for Compliance Teams
FindLEI is a tool that solves this in a single workflow:
- Upload your Excel or LibreOffice Calc file
- Select the column containing your LEI codes
- Click Start
- The tool queries the GLEIF API for each LEI — automatically
- Results are written back into your spreadsheet: Entity Status + Next Renewal Date
No manual lookups. No copy-paste. No formatting inconsistencies. Just a clean, enriched spreadsheet ready for review.
Who Is This For?
Compliance officers running periodic counterparty reviews
KYC/AML analysts validating entity lists before onboarding
Risk teams maintaining live registers of active trading counterparties
Operations teams doing pre-settlement LEI checks
If your team touches a spreadsheet of LEIs more than once a month, FindLEI will save you meaningful time every single cycle.
Why GLEIF — and Why It Matters
FindLEI queries the official GLEIF API — the authoritative global source for LEI data. This means:
- Results are audit-ready (sourced from the regulatory ground truth)
- No third-party data quality risk
- Coverage of 2.4M+ registered entities globally
An optional fallback provider handles edge cases where GLEIF returns no result, ensuring maximum coverage even for unusual datasets.
Built for Scale, Not Just One-Offs
The tool is designed to handle real compliance workloads — not just a handful of records:
Rate-limit aware: delays and retries built in so large runs don't fail halfway through
Consistent output: same column structure every time, regardless of input size
No IT dependency: runs without needing infrastructure changes or API key management on the user's side
Try It
🔗 Web app: findlei.com
💻 Open source repo: github.com/ThanasisSoftwareDeveloper/Banks-L.E.I.
The project is open source (GPLv3). Feedback, issue reports, and contributions are welcome.
Built out of frustration watching compliance teams spend hours on a problem that should take minutes.