Four decades ago, a business revolution started with a packet of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum. On June 26 1974 the packet carrying a barcode was swiped under an electronic reader in an Ohio supermarket, marking the first time anything had “read” an item with a standardised, 11-digit barcode label.
Since then barcodes have become so ubiquitous – and, crucially, so standardised – that shops and suppliers can manage goods with extraordinary efficiency, via digital networks that can read the “labels”, anywhere on the globe.
Could a similar revolution now be starting in high finance? It would be nice to hope so. A few weeks ago an obscure group of regulators and bankers met in Switzerland to create a new cross-border foundation to oversee a system of so-called global “legal entity identifiers”, or LEIs.