Company Registry Search (LEI / GLEIF)

Look up companies worldwide by name or by LEI code and get one clean, normalized record per company: legal name, whether it is active, its number in the local business register, legal form, legal and head-office addresses. The data comes from GLEIF, the official global index of Legal Entity Identifiers, which covers over 3 million legal entities worldwide. Pass one query or a list of up to 1,000 in a single run. You pay only for lookups that found a company.

What you get

One dataset item per query you send. Here is one, for input Tesco PLC with maxMatches: 1:

{
  "query": "Tesco PLC",
  "queryType": "name",
  "reasonCode": "found",
  "totalMatches": 13,
  "matches": [
    {
      "lei": "2138002P5RNKC5W2JZ46",
      "legalName": "TESCO PLC",
      "otherNames": [],
      "entityStatus": "ACTIVE",
      "leiStatus": "ISSUED",
      "jurisdiction": "GB",
      "legalForm": "B6ES",
      "registrationAuthority": "RA000585",
      "registrationNumber": "00445790",
      "legalAddress": {
        "lines": ["TESCO HOUSE", "SHIRE PARK, KESTREL WAY"],
        "city": "WELWYN GARDEN CITY",
        "region": "GB-HRT",
        "postalCode": "AL7 1GA",
        "country": "GB"
      },
      "headquartersAddress": { "...": "same shape" },
      "creationDate": "1947-11-27T00:00:00Z",
      "leiLastUpdated": "2025-11-21T07:42:21Z",
      "openCorporatesId": "gb/00445790",
      "bic": ["TSCOGB2LTPF", "TSCOGB2LXXX"]
    }
  ]
}

Use it when

• You have a list of company names and need each one's official legal name, status and registry number.
• You hold LEI codes (from trade reporting, KYC files or a bond prospectus) and want the entity behind each.
• You want to know whether a counterparty is still active, or whether its LEI has lapsed.
• An agent needs a typed company record instead of a web search.

Input

Field	Type	Required	What it does
queries	array of strings	yes	Company names or 20-character LEI codes, up to 1,000 per run. An LEI is recognized automatically, with or without spaces and in any case. Repeats (the same name ignoring case and spacing, or the same LEI) are looked up and charged once.
country	string	no	Only return companies whose legal address is in this country, as an ISO 3166 two-letter code (DE, GB, US; UK is read as GB). An unknown code rejects the run before any lookup. Applies to name searches, not to LEI lookups.
maxMatches	integer	no	How many companies to return per name search, best match first, 1 to 100. Default 5. The charge is per search, not per company.

Output

Field	What it holds
query	Your query, as sent.
queryType	lei or name; null when the query had nothing to search for.
reasonCode	What happened. See the pricing table.
totalMatches	How many records match in total. matches holds the first maxMatches.
matches[].lei	The 20-character Legal Entity Identifier.
matches[].legalName, otherNames	The registered legal name, plus trading names and transliterations GLEIF holds.
matches[].entityStatus	ACTIVE, or INACTIVE for a dissolved or merged entity.
matches[].leiStatus	The LEI's own status. ISSUED is current; LAPSED means the entity stopped renewing it, which says nothing about whether the company still trades.
matches[].jurisdiction	Where the entity is incorporated, e.g. GB or US-DE.
matches[].legalForm	ISO 20275 legal-form code (e.g. B6ES is a UK public limited company), or GLEIF's free text when there is no code.
matches[].registrationAuthority, registrationNumber	The local business register (GLEIF's RA… code, e.g. RA000585 is Companies House) and the company's number in it.
matches[].legalAddress, headquartersAddress	Address lines, city, region, postal code and country.
matches[].creationDate	When the entity was founded, where GLEIF knows it.
matches[].leiLastUpdated	When the record was last updated.
matches[].openCorporatesId, bic	The matching OpenCorporates id and SWIFT BICs, where GLEIF links them.

A name search returns the maxMatches companies GLEIF ranks best for that name. If one of them has exactly the legal name you asked for, ignoring case, it moves to the top. The Actor does not look beyond those results, so an exact match that GLEIF ranks lower can be missing. Raise maxMatches if you need it.

Pricing

Pay per event, $2.00 per 1,000 successful lookups ($0.002 each), charged on the company-registry-found event.

One charge per query that found at least one company, however many matches it returns. Lookups that found nothing are free.

reasonCode	Charged
found	yes
no_match (no LEI holder matches the name)	no
lei_not_found (a well-formed LEI GLEIF has no record of)	no
invalid_lei (20 characters shaped like an LEI whose check digits are wrong: a typo)	no
invalid_query (nothing searchable: no letter or digit)	no
upstream_error (GLEIF failed or timed out)	no

If you set a maximum total charge for a run, the Actor stops as soon as that limit is reached instead of working for free. Items after that point are left out of the dataset and not charged, and the run log says how many; submit them in a new run.

Limits

• Only entities that hold an LEI are in the index. Banks, listed companies, funds and most firms that trade financial instruments have one. Many small private companies do not. So no_match means "no LEI holder by that name", not "no such company".
• Name search matches words in the name; it does not correct spelling.
• Queries are looked up one after another. If you set a maximum charge for the run, or the run reaches its timeout, it stops there. The items already written stay in the dataset, so you can re-run the remainder.

Data source

GLEIF publishes the LEI data under CC0, free for any use. This Actor queries GLEIF's public API directly and keeps no copy.