On 13 June in Switzerland, the project to acquire an international identification number was unanimously approved. Objective: better supervision of companies active in the financial sector. Indeed, the company identification system was reformed after the 2008 financial crisis. G20 countries subsequently called for the means of identifying stakeholders to be strengthened, in this case this uniform system, also called the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), literally “Identifiant d’Entité Juridique”. For example, the bank J.P. Morgan appeared under different names such as JPM, JP Morgan… The idea is to give it a standardised identifier. At the end of 2015, at the invitation of the G20, Switzerland became a full member of the international committee overseeing the system for identifying financial players. It must now adapt its legal basis. And according to the revision of the law on the business identification number, it is the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) that will assign identifiers in Switzerland, which until now Swiss companies obtained abroad.
