The Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) market is interesting – it’s dominated by a small number of large LEI issuers, most of them being financial institutions, or with close ties to financial institutions. When we launched our RapidLEI service in June 2018, we knew it would take an innovative approach to gain traction in the market. Our challenge was to convince buyers to no longer obtain LEIs through the household name institutions and instead try RapidLEI.
Ubisecure’s core business is essentially a set of identity APIs that help developers build secure, standards-based identity management into their applications. Because of this, the Ubisecure name is rarely visible to the consumer, even though daily our technology touches millions of people, and Ubisecure is typically only known by developers, system architects and integrators.
So in summary we were launching a new LEI service created by a company customers likely hadn’t heard of. To establish the RapidLEI name and give buyers a compelling reason to switch to us, we needed a disruptive approach to the market.
That disruption came from four distinct, but connected areas:
- Automation and User Experience – we made the LEI process faster, simpler and more accurate. Customers love it, at the time of writing this we are rated “Excellent” with a 9.3 satisfaction score on TrustPilot: https://www.trustpilot.com/review/rapidlei.com
- Partner Ecosystem – RapidLEI is a partner-first company, every day new partners join us to service local markets. We have developed a Market Development Fund (MDF) and co-marketing program to help key partners take their offering to market faster and more effectively. We’re also taking LEI to a wider channel, with resellers, hosting companies and technology vendors now building LEIs into their product portfolios.
- New Use Cases – we’re working with the largest global Certificate Authorities and their governing bodies to determine how LEIs can be the verifiable identity in PKI applications. Later this year we will start showcasing technology to automate the interactions and assurances within the three key identity domains; individuals, organisations and things. In this solution organisations are represented by LEIs and sets the scene for our LEI+ offering.
- Integration – our new API (being launched later this month) will allow any partner or developer to build LEI requests and issuance into their applications or help their workflows scale.
Any one of these initiatives would have been new to the LEI world, the fact that we bring all four at once in our first 6 months is something unusual.
A little over half a year after launching the service, are we making an impact? It appears so. The GLEIF 2018 stats show that as the year ended, we’re already outpacing some of those household name financial institutions for validated LEIs!
RapidLEI issuance statistics – first 6 months
In June 2018, our first full month in business, we issued 27 validated LEIs. In December 2018, we issued 852 validated LEIs. For December, that ranked us as the 8th largest issuer of new validated LEIs worldwide that month. After just 6 months of business RapidLEI was ahead of institutions like London Stock Exchange, Tokyo Stock Exchange, Irish Stock Exchange and the Dutch Chambers of Commerce.
To catch up to the top two or three providers we certainly have a lot more growing to do, but we’re happy with the positive response to our approach. We will continue to work hard and do the best we can to serve our partners and customers as we take the company to the next level.
To obtain LEIs, or partner with Ubisecure to provide LEIs to your clients, check out https://rapidlei.com
About The Author: Steve Waite
As Chief Marketing Officer, Steve is responsible for Ubisecure’s corporate marketing and communication, partner and customer communication, demand generation and brand development.
More posts by Steve Waite