Crunchbase, LEI, PermID and OpenFIGI Company Identifiers
TextRazor disambiguates and links entities to canonical IDs from Wikidata, Wikipedia and Freebase wherever possible. There are many ways one might refer to any particular entity, so these IDs can provide a handy abstraction in many applications.
Wikipedia can be a bit patchy for the long tail of certain types of entity. Companies in particular can be a problem. Millions of organizations around the world can be hard to track, especially when they can change names every few years. In recent years several standards have emerged to assign companies globally unique stable IDs.
Today we've added external links to four new sources:
| permid | Links to Thomson Reuters Open PermID. PermID provides comprehensive identification across a wide variety of entity types including organizations, instruments, funds, issuers and people. PermID never changes and is unambiguous, making it ideal as a reference identifier. |
| lei | A Legal Entity Identifier (or LEI) is a international identifier made up of a 20-character identifier that identifies distinct legal entities that engage in financial transactions. It is defined by ISO 17442. Natural persons are not required to have an LEI; they’re eligible to have one issued, however, but only if they act in an independent business capacity. The LEI is a global standard, designed to be non-proprietary data that is freely accessible to all. As of December 2018, over 1,300,000 legal entities from more than 200 countries have now been issued with LEIs. |
| crunchbaseId | Crunchbase is a platform for finding business information about private and public companies. Crunchbase information includes investments and funding information, founding members and individuals in leadership positions, mergers and acquisitions, news, and industry trends. Originally built to track startups, the Crunchbase website contains information on public and private companies globally. |
| figi | The Financial Instrument Global Identifier (FIGI) (formerly Bloomberg Global Identifier (BBGID)) is an open standard, unique identifier of financial instruments that can be assigned to instruments including common stock, options, derivatives, futures, corporate and government bonds, municipals, currencies, and mortgage products. |
These new links are now being added to our "Entity" results, you can start using them immediately. Our result for "RBS" now looks a bit like this:
We try to be agnostic to symbology providers - rather than depending on one in particular we link to as many as possible. If you are looking for canonical company data we'd suggest starting with either Crunchbase or PermID, which have our greatest coverage of companies from startups to multinationals. These datasets both make it easy to enrich your data with company URLs, locations, funding data and key company people.
We've also recently released some other upgrades in the finance domain. We're now spotting and linking company tickers from all major exchanges worldwide. Spotting company tickers is trickier than you might expect - a given company might be listed on a number of exchanges with varying ticker symbols. "Apple Inc." might be referred to as "NASDAQ:AAPL" "AAPL.OQ" "AAPL US Equity" in different publications, or "$AAPL" on StockTwits. We're now keeping track of all of this.
Please let us know If you have any feedback.
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