LEI - the biggest little change in history?

In the late 1970's I was working on a Payroll System which only catered for an equivalent hourly rate of pay of £9.99 (£19,220 per annum).

Mind you, that was at Arnold Weinstock's GEC, so there were only 3 people out of 20,000 in my Division whose salary had to be done manually.

Chris: 

A small field for a programmer, but a giant record...

As its name suggests, BIC is expected to identify a bank, and it seems to do that quite well. As far as I know, BIC wasn't envisaged to identify non-banking business identities, and it should continue to serve its purpose even after IBEI/LEI come into existence.  

Y2K, the most famous/notorious of these field-related changes, illustrated that data standard change initiatives gather steam only when the doomsday is just around the corner. Unless I'm missing something, that's not the case for BIC/IBEI/LEI.

@Keith:

Your example about limitations in Payroll Systems reminds me of this interesting story in The Partners, the book about Goldman Sachs, which talks about the huge disparity in state of technology across different parts of the famous investment banking firm. Even while its trading systems could do HFT in milliseconds, its payroll system couldn't print a check/cheque above USD 10,000!   

You're right of course, Ketheraman - no reason for banks to stop using BIC codes to identify banks.  But it's always best to use a standard for what it was designed, rather than as a general-purpose panacea for identifying every business entity and legal entity that exists.

It will also be interesting to see how the world of commerce responds to this initiative.  Commercial organisations have been exchanging messages electronically with each other for decades, and have developed a number of international standards to help them to meet those business needs.  It will probably be more effective if banks also take those other existing standards into account in their proposals for a new LEI standard.  Many countries already have LEI standards, so whether we need a new and different "global solution" or just one that allows each country to continue with its own system is a valid issue.

For example, there is not just one global passport authority for the world that issues each individual's passport, and in today's networked world a federated solution for identity seems to be one that best fits a lot of requirements.