Features
Analyst/Data Manager
Automation, Data Quality, Reliability, Productivity
The Financial Instrument Global Identifier (FIGI) provides comprehensive global coverage of the financial markets. FIGI covers financial instruments around the globe, including many assets that lack any other comprehensive open identifier such as loans, futures and options and indices. Symbol coordination is a key challenge to developing equity research applications for global markets. Tickers and other market identifiers can change as a result of corporate actions, which often results in the need to remap content. FIGIs, however, never change, are never reused, and are permanent, allowing users to maintain data integrity over a time period of multiple corporate actions and changes. Further, comparing prices and activity for an instrument traded across multiple exchanges, FIGI provides a data model that can resolve across different exchanges' ticker systems, enabling aggregating on a country or global level, and help organize instrument data to discover more insights. When leveraging automation, data quality is the most important success factor for a firm. OpenFIGI is a reliable tool for mapping and cleansing the vast amount of instruments received from many data providers. FIGI can enhance productivity and help easier integration with other data providers.
Traders
Value, Error Reduction, Smart Analyzation
Based on the same identifiers used in the Bloomberg Professional® service and Bloomberg's Enterprise Solutions, but now declared as an Open Standard, and further enhanced by additional Certified Providers like Kaiko, providing enhanced coverage in newer assets like cryptocurrencies. The Financial Instrument Global Identifier (FIGI) provides comprehensive global coverage across asset classes, with a never changing identifier. FIGI adds value through a data model approach to instrument identification. The industry requires an identifier not only to be accurate, but also unique in order to link the full lifecycle of a trade — from execution, through settlement, reporting, valuation, and position keeping. As such FIGI plays a key role in reducing errors in trade matching, and reduces costly data mapping and transformation errors when communicating with middle and back offices, as well as with counterparties and clients. Risk exists across asset classes and geographies. In the world of equities, it is assigned at venue, country and global share class level - aligned with the different processes stock goes through. In fixed income, such as Municipals, maturities are connected to series and the deal, providing the connective tissue needed. And cryptocurrencies are linked together to associate pairs on different exchanges with the assets. Being able to tie together standards and proprietary methodologies specific to these silos is critical for assembling a true picture of risk across an enterprise. FIGI and Open Symbology provides the foundation for linking, normalizing, and then analyzing data that historically was too difficult to proactively manage and bring together.
Company Officers
Simplification, Accuracy, Transparency, Cost Reduction
Firms' leaders and enterprise wide managers, such as in risk and compliance, need to bring together and aggregate instrument data from a vast array of different sources internally and externally. However, data is stored against different identifiers based on functional need; traders use tickers specific to exchanges while settlement use identifiers that correspond to national depository systems. Meanwhile, data comes from different vendors, and clients state preferences for specific identifiers they wish to see on reports. Data is trapped in silos, using different reference systems, creating barriers for bringing together unified views. FIGI provides a data model for linking and associating all these codes, simplifying the task of bringing disparate data sets together and interoperate, increasing data quality and accuracy for key functions that impact a firm's risk, forecasting, and analysis. In short, utilizing the FIGI framework increases data transparency while reducing the cost of licensed identifiers, provides better data quality in regards to risk and compliance and enterprise wide functions.
Developers & Engineers
Free to Use, Powerful Filtering, Flexibility, Automatic Updates
The web based API is free to use without daily, weekly or monthly limitations. With a free API key, users can map thousands of instruments and ingest the data to internal security masters in minutes. The static output returns the FIGI and related Open Symbology metadata in the exact order requested for easier absorption. Results can be narrowed down using a variety of related descriptive filters. FIGI can be used as a primary key in all types of databases because it is unique for each record and consistent in structure across all asset types. FIGI can sit alongside or in place of existing 'internal codes'. FIGI can also be extended for external use, and is able to be freely shared across firms and jurisdictions to provide a single connected web of hierarchies and connectivity between existing proprietary schemes. Unique URLs correspond to each FIGI record, enabling their use as IRIs for developers. Open Symbology will update, build, and administer its security identifiers to ensure they continue to serve as effective symbols for the broad uses required in today's financial markets.