For people working in finance or regulatory reporting: when does an LEI actually become important in day-to-day work?
I've been reading more about how Legal Entity Identifiers are used across financial transactions and regulatory reporting.
On paper, the idea is straightforward: a unique identifier makes it easier to identify the legal entity involved in a transaction.
What I'm more interested in is the practical side.
For those working in banking, treasury, trading, regulatory reporting, KYC, or entity-data management:
At what point does an LEI become something you actually have to think about?
Is it normally during onboarding, transaction reporting, trading, counterparty checks, opening financial accounts, or somewhere else?
And when an LEI is missing or has lapsed, does it cause real operational problems, or is fixing it usually straightforward?
Interested in hearing how this works in actual workflows rather than just the regulatory definition.