The CICI Utility, available at www.ciciutility.org, was established by DTCC and SWIFT to provide legal entity identifiers to be used by regulators and the financial industry in the management of systemic risk and related regulatory reporting. The legal entity identifiers issued by the CICI Utility are currently being used to satisfy the requirements of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which will begin mandating the use of CFTC Interim Compliant Identifiers (CICIs) for trading in OTC credit and interest rate derivatives after October 12, 2012, and for all other OTC derivatives asset classes after mid-January 2013.

"Given the fact that we began this near the end of August, when many people are on vacation, we were delighted at the strong response we have received so far, and we expect to be registering many more legal entities over the next month before the CTFC's deadline for reporting begins," said William Hodash, DTCC Managing Director, Business Development.

The utility also makes available both full and change files for download of the CICI database for free to anyone who registers on the site. To date, there were more than 740 full database downloads and more than 420 downloads of the change file database. The utility also received more than 275 emails to date through their customer service email address, customerservice@ciciutility.org, from users who had inquiries about the CICI Utility service.

"We are glad to report that operations started very smoothly and the activity we see on the portal confirms that the firms are busy preparing and implementing the new identifiers in their own operations," said Paul Janssens, SWIFT LEI Programme Director.

The CICI Utility also continued to expand its services to help financial market participants register for and access CICIs more effectively. DTCC and SWIFT made a decision to provide the capability for investment fund managers to bulk register their funds, which would also permit a different payment method than use of a credit card.

"One of the key requests we received from customers was for a way to upload a spreadsheet of pre-formatted data that would allow bulk data registrations for fund managers that have hundreds or even thousands of funds to register," said Ron Jordan, DTCC's Chief Information Officer. "We decided to make available to those managers a spreadsheet template that they could use to submit all their funds at once, and which would offer a payment method other than credit cards and more suitable for large numbers of registrations.

"This new capability will be provided for those organizations that have a large number of legal entities to register, and who need CICIs quickly so they can meet the requirements of the CFTC for trading OTC credit derivatives and interest rate derivatives in October," Jordan said. "Ordinarily, the CICI Utility web portal is where we expect firms to go if they require a CICI." Details on this new feature will be made available shortly through trade associations and on the CICI Utility website.

The CFTC requires major swap dealers and participants to report any trades not only with CICIs for themselves, but also for their counterparties. It also requires all swap counterparties to obtain a CICI as part of the recordkeeping related to such transactions. These rules require that many firms globally will need CICIs to be issued, and they will need to register or certify their information in the CICI Utility database. The CICI Utility currently has more than 25,000 legal entities registered in the databases from more than 80 countries.

The CICI will ultimately transition to the global LEI program, which is being overseen by the Financial Stability Board (FSB) on behalf of the G20 nations.