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The Legal Entities API exposes the GLEIF Global LEI Index: the Legal Entity Identifier registry that banks, regulators and reporting regimes key on worldwide. It arrives two ways — as a raw Open Feed (the registry near as-published) and as a fused endpoint that resolves an entity through our spine and returns its corporate hierarchy.
This is corporate hierarchy, not ownership. GLEIF Level 2 records accounting consolidation under IFRS/US-GAAP — which entity consolidates which into its financial statements. It carries no ownership percentages and excludes natural persons, so it is not beneficial-ownership data and must not be used as a substitute for it. Where GLEIF records no percentage, this API asserts none.
The Open Feed endpoints are plan-gated on can_use_gleif, included on the Analyst plan and up; the fused /hierarchy endpoint uses the existing can_use_exposure entitlement. The LEI itself is ungated — it is CC0 and already flows on GET /api/v2/search.

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Coverage is partial, and the API says so

The single most important field is coverage, and it exists because “no parent returned” has three very different meanings: Read coverage before you read hierarchy. A null parent with a reporting exception is a fact about the filing; a null parent with lei_present: false is a fact about us.

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Open Feed

GET /api/v2/gleif/entities — filtered list over the LEI universe. At least one filter is required: the feed covers 3.39M records, so an unfiltered listing returns 400 FILTER_REQUIRED rather than being served slowly. GET /api/v2/gleif/entities/{lei} — one full record plus its relationships, declared reporting exceptions and ISINs. A structurally impossible LEI returns 400 INVALID_LEI (it fails the ISO 17442 check digit); a well-formed LEI we do not hold returns 404. GET /api/v2/gleif/relationships — Level-2 records. lei matches either endpoint. Note the source convention: the start node is the child and the end node is the parent. GET /api/v2/gleif/isin — lei → ISINs, or isin → LEI. One of the two is required.

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Corporate hierarchy (fused)

GET /api/v2/entities/{entity_id}/hierarchy accepts the same identifiers as the rest of the API — a name, an e_ id, a wiki: id, a wikipedia_url — and a bare 20-character LEI. The identifier you searched with works at this hop too, so GET /api/v2/search → /hierarchy composes without translating ids.
child_count is null, never 0, when the requested direction excluded children — an omitted count and a counted zero are different claims.
Point-in-time (as_of) is not supported for this source. The hierarchy reflects the latest golden copy we loaded; prior states are not reconstructable.

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Searching the registry

GET /api/v2/search?universe=registry&q=… searches all 3.39M records by legal name or LEI. Registry results stay in their own lane and never appear under universe=all or universe=reference — a registry hit is a legal-entity registration, not evidence of news coverage. Each result carries resolved_in_spine, telling you whether we also cover the entity itself, and a lei that chains onward to /api/v2/gleif/entities/{lei} and /api/v2/entities/{lei}/hierarchy.

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Licence and attribution

GLEIF publishes the Global LEI Index under CC0 1.0. Every response carries meta.attributions[] with GLEIF’s required notice: the data is provided as is and as available, and GLEIF does not endorse, support or authorize this product or its outputs. Nothing here is “GLEIF-verified”.