GLEIF LEI Normalizer — Corporate Ownership & KYC Enrichment

Search the global GLEIF Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) registry and get clean, KYC-ready records with the full corporate ownership chain resolved. This Actor queries GLEIF's free public API (no key required), then normalizes the raw data into structured, human-readable output.

What it does

• 🔍 Search legal entities worldwide by name (e.g. Johnson & Johnson, Siemens, Barclays) or look up an exact 20-character LEI
• 🌍 Jurisdiction mapping — converts ISO country codes (US, DE, IN) into full country names
• 🏢 Legal-form mapping — converts GLEIF's cryptic legal-form codes into readable descriptions
• 🧹 Legal-name canonicalization — strips legal suffixes (Inc., Ltd, GmbH, S.A.S.…) for entity resolution
• 🌳 Corporate ownership tree — resolves each entity's direct parent and ultimate parent (the top of the ownership chain)
• ✅ Status normalization — entity + registration statuses mapped to readable labels and flags
• 📍 Address flattening — legal and headquarters addresses normalized to single-line strings

Why you'd use it

• KYC / AML compliance — verify legal entity identities and ownership structure
• Supply-chain mapping — trace who ultimately owns a supplier or counterparty
• Corporate registry data — build clean entity databases for enrichment pipelines
• Journalism / investigations — map corporate ownership networks
• Competitive intelligence — identify subsidiaries of a parent group

Input parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
searchQuery	string	one of searchQuery/lei	Legal name to search (e.g. Johnson & Johnson)
lei	string	one of searchQuery/lei	Exact LEI lookup (e.g. 549300G0CFPGEF6X2043)
jurisdiction	string	no	Filter by 2-letter ISO country code (US, DE, GB…)
entityStatus	select	no	ACTIVE / INACTIVE / all
includeOwnershipTree	boolean	no	Resolve direct + ultimate parent (default true)
maxResults	integer	no	Max entities to return (1–200, default 25)

Example input

{
  "searchQuery": "Johnson & Johnson",
  "jurisdiction": "",
  "entityStatus": "ACTIVE",
  "includeOwnershipTree": true,
  "maxResults": 10
}

Example output

{
  "lei": "549300G0CFPGEF6X2043",
  "legalName": "Johnson & Johnson",
  "legalNameNormalized": "Johnson & Johnson",
  "country": "United States",
  "countryCode": "US",
  "legalForm": "Corporation",
  "legalAddress": "One Johnson & Johnson Plaza, New Brunswick, US-NJ, 08933, United States",
  "statusLabel": "Active",
  "isActive": true,
  "registrationStatusLabel": "Issued (active)",
  "nextRenewalDate": "2027-08-15T00:00:00Z",
  "ultimateParent": {
    "lei": "549300G0CFPGEF6X2043",
    "legalName": "Johnson & Johnson",
    "country": "United States"
  }
}

A search for Janssen returns the subsidiary JANSSEN-CILAG (BE) with its ultimateParent resolved to Johnson & Johnson (US) — the kind of corporate-ownership linkage that's otherwise slow and error-prone to assemble by hand.

Data source

Data is sourced live from the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) public API (api.gleif.org). GLEIF publishes the global LEI index under an open-data licence that permits commercial use. No API key is required.