Client onboarding, reference data and business research vendor Alacra has added global intermediary identifier numbers (GIINs) to the Alacra Authority File Plus (AAF+), officials say.
There are approximately 140,000 institutions with GIINs, which are issued by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to foreign financial institutions (FFI) as part of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), officials say. GIINs facilitate the reporting and compliance obligations placed on FFIs by FATCA.
“The IRS process of assigning GIINs is significantly constrained by a lack of linkages and mapping to any commonly used public identifiers, such as the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and the CIK (Central Index Key),” according to an Alacra statement.
Alacra officials say the addition of GIINs to its AAF+ solution will help clients manage FATCA compliance, and that each entity will be cross-mapped to all the public identifiers such as the LEI standard, as well as proprietary vendor identifiers like the bank identifier code (BIC) “through an appropriate end-user license,” the statement says.
“The limitations of the IRS provision of GIINs have the potential to adversely impact users,” says Alan Samuels, vice president of Alacra Reference Data Solutions, in a prepared statement. “The inconsistent naming conventions, and the lack of additional attribute information can really hamper the correct identification of an entity.”
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