With the European reporting deadline creeping closer a number of questions have arisen in Europe around the regulatory requirement, which legal entity identifier is to be used under EMIR. There was no clear guidance available from regulators nor trade repositories apart that the expectation was that (pre-) LEIs were to be used to report legal entities. It was also unclear if an already assigned CICI (CFTC Interim Compliant Identifier) would be a possible contender for reporting in the EU. Some voices were heard that would suggest this was not a possibility. But as a large number of entities were already registered on ciciutility.org (most of them through third-party application) – what would that mean to them? The CICI Utility has now taken steps to clean up their current identifier database. Based on an "Urgent Notice" from August, 5th to all CICI Utility users that as of August, 30th

"uncertified CICIs that have never been used in regulatory reporting (approximately 18,000) will be permanently removed from the CICI database. Entities associated with these uncertified CICIs will need to re-register for a new identifier for future regulatory reporting."

Furthermore, the notice says that

"Uncertified records include those registered as part of the preloading of the CICI Utility dataset, as well as those that were registered by a third-party without the explicit permission of the entity being registered, and which have not subsequently been certified. These records will be removed from the CICI Utility dataset and will not be visible via the CICI Utility Portal search function or the daily files."

Thus, those market participants who were previously unsure whether to certify their CICI can now refrain from doing so and apply at a LOU of their choice (e.g. WM Datenservice).