The UCI should eventually graduate to a Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) which is a unique ID associated with a single corporate entity which assists in easy identification of the same party across multiple financial market utilities and aids in tracking settlement activity and exposures.
The financial crisis clearly demonstrated the extreme “complexity of interrelationships” and dependencies that exist between parties, counterparties, issuers, guarantees, and guarantors and the domino effect that takes place should one or more of the nodes within these horizontal or vertical relationships come under pressure. Unique identification of each and every entity would be critical to unravelling these linkages and (inter)relationships.