Entity Bind vs PermID
Free permanent identifiers, and largely unrivalled in capital markets. We do not issue them.
Keep PermID, and put Entity Bind beside it. Send a few hundred rows with the matches you already have on them: each one comes back accepted, withheld or contradicted, with the register page that settles it and a receipt that reopens at a URL.
Your company master has to survive somebody else’s audit, and every merge in it needs a reason a person outside your team can read. This page compares on that axis: what each side is for, where the alternative is stronger, and what we would do in your place.
PermID: Free permanent identifiers for organisations, instruments and quotes, and largely unrivalled in capital markets. Entity Bind: Register-shaped rather than market-shaped. We do not issue PermIDs and cannot supply one — the crosswalk says so.
4 of the 11 rows in the table below go to PermID and 6 go to Entity Bind. The rows on their side are the reason to keep what you already run; the rows on ours are what we would add beside it.
The short answer
PermID is LSEG's open permanent identifier system: free, persistent identifiers for organisations, instruments, quotes and industry classifications, published as linked data with an entity matching service on top — that is LSEG's own published description of the programme and we have not audited it. For capital markets it is excellent and largely unrivalled among free identifiers, because it reaches issuers, funds, instruments and quotes, and no company register reaches any of those. Where your counterparties are listed issuers or the securities they issue, PermID covers them and costs nothing. Entity Bind is register-shaped rather than market-shaped. It resolves messy rows to a register of incorporation with a per-field citation, a calibrated confidence and a documented refusal, and it reaches private companies that never touch a market. We do not issue PermIDs and cannot supply one: the scheme is not wired here, and the crosswalk says so in the same words it uses for D-U-N-S.
The answer for your own rows needs your own rows: a few hundred of them, with the matches you already have beside them.
Start freeOn this page
What Entity Bind adds beside PermID
Run both, and this is the half we do. Each of these is a job the other side of this page is not built for.
- Your rows are private companies that never touch a market, where the register is the only authority there is.
- You need the register of incorporation's own answer, cited per field with its licence and its age.
- You need a refusal with a shortlist rather than a best match with a score.
- You need a receipt, because somebody will ask about the attachment months later.
- You need to know which of the identifiers already attached to your rows are attached to the wrong company.
A stewardship queue and a supplier file before a payment run want different halves of that list. Create your Free workspace to inspect your own rows, or contact us for a guided review of the checks your workflow needs.
Start freeThe case for PermID
Read these before the table. On some evaluations one of them settles the question on its own, and if it settles yours, keep what you have and put us beside it.
- Free, permanent, openly published identifiers with resolvable URIs, which is the exact property this product insists on and rarely finds.
- Instruments, quotes and funds. A register of incorporation has no concept of a security, and this is a whole layer of identity we do not model at all.
- Issuer coverage across global markets, joined to industry classification and to other market identifiers, maintained by an organisation whose day job is capital markets reference data.
- An entity matching service you can send a file to at no cost on the open tier, which for a lot of teams is the entire job done for nothing.
- Linked data as a first-class output, so the identifier is machine-readable and dereferenceable rather than a bare string in a column.
- It joins into a much larger commercial reference data estate if you are already inside it.
Requirements that point to PermID
- Your counterparties are listed issuers, funds or the instruments they issue.
- You need an identifier for a security, an exchange listing or a quote rather than for a legal entity.
- Free is the requirement and a persistent public URI is the deliverable.
- You are already in the LSEG estate and the identifier is what joins your data to it.
- You know which entity you mean and want a durable key for it.
If one of those is your requirement, say so when you write to us. We will tell you where the answer is PermID, and what running Entity Bind beside it would add: an independent verdict on each match, with the register page that supports it. Cheaper for both of us than finding out in month three.
Entity Bind and PermID, dimension by dimension
Every row carries a verdict. 4 go to PermID, 6 to Entity Bind and 1 is even. Both columns are filled in on every row, so a verdict can be read against what each side actually does about it.
| Dimension | PermID | Entity Bind | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free on the open tier, which is difficult to beat. | One credit shallow, five deep, zero for an abstention or a byte-identical replay. Free needs no card; paid monthly subscriptions use Stripe in workspace Billing, while usage metering creates no automatic usage or overage charges. | PermID |
| Instruments, quotes and funds | Identifiers for securities, listings and quotes, joined to their issuers. | None. A register of incorporation does not model a security, and neither do we. That layer is theirs. | PermID |
| Listed issuer coverage | Global market coverage maintained by a capital markets reference data business. | Filers rather than markets: United States (filers) contributes 6,471 tickered filers with complete rows, and the exchange arrives as free text, so a ticker is only unambiguous once it is normalised against a market identifier code — which is a planned source here, not a live one. | PermID |
| Can you get a PermID from us | They issue it, so obviously yes. | No. The scheme is not wired here and the crosswalk reports it that way — the same not-configured finding we publish for D-U-N-S, which is a different thing from a company that genuinely holds no identifier. | PermID |
| A persistent, citable identifier URI | The identifier is itself a dereferenceable URI, which is the right design. | Every fact carries the source's own URL, and every decision carries an id that reopens the whole evidence trail. Different artefacts, both openable. | Even |
| Private companies with no market presence | Organisation coverage is strongest where a company touches the markets. | Registers of incorporation first, which is where private companies actually exist: 5,464,811 live companies in United Kingdom, 5,841,117 legal persons in France, 450,754 corporate forms in Norway. | Entity Bind |
| Resolving a messy file | A matching service that returns candidate matches with a score. | A decision with a floor beneath it: A match below 0.90 confidence is unrepresentable. The record comes back as an abstention with a ranked shortlist instead. The abstention carries the ranked shortlist, a typed cause and the column that would have settled it. | Entity Bind |
| What the confidence means | A service-defined match score. | How often decisions like this one turned out right, read at the cautious end of the range: the 95% Wilson lower bound over the population the decision belongs to, recomputed from recorded counts by the test suite. Confidence bounds depend on the recorded evidence population; there is no universal score for every match. Read match_confidence_basis and the evidence. A 0.99 filter can return some v8 adjudicated matches while excluding valid identifier matches, so validate its coverage cost on your own inputs. | Entity Bind |
| Provenance per field | The identifier and its record. | Source id, source URL, retrieved and first-seen dates, last confirmed, confirmation count, licence, resale flag and age in days, on every field, with the entity reporting the age of its stalest one. | Entity Bind |
| Auditability of one attachment | The identifier is the artefact. | The decision is the artefact: features, thresholds, cited evidence, model and prompt version, and a re-scoring from the stored features. | Entity Bind |
| Checking identifiers already on your rows | Not the shape of the product. | Send the row with the identifier already attached and it is accepted, withheld or contradicted independently, with the register page behind the verdict. | Entity Bind |
Three limits sit behind every comparison in this section — what we hold, where we stand and how ready we are — and the comparison hub states all three at full size. The figures in our own column were measured on internal fixtures; the accuracy page carries the method and the population behind each one.
- No SOC 2. It has not been started.
- No independent external validation of the accuracy figures. Every fixture is one we built.
- No production customer holdout. The evidence is internal.
A table cannot weigh those rows against your file, and neither can a fixture of ours — your own records are the only ones that settle it.
Start freeBuilt for, and wrong for
Neither of these depends on which alternative you are weighing. They are the two answers that decide whether the comparison above is worth your time at all.
Teams with a company master they have to defend — an MDM or stewardship queue, a CRM after a migration or a merger, a supplier file before a payment run, or counterparty onboarding that has to survive an audit.
Buying breadth as the product: we hold a fraction of an incumbent’s records and are not building a global company graph. Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.
Where the figures on this page come from
Only the numbers that are not ours are listed here. Each one is the vendor’s own published claim. We have not audited anybody’s coverage figure, and as far as we know neither has anybody outside the company that published it.
- LSEG PermID
LSEG's own published description of the open identifier programme and its matching service, recorded as the vendor's claim. We have not audited its coverage or its terms, and both can change. Recorded on 2026-09-02.
The method behind our half of this comparison
2 articles that set out how the decision is made and measured, rather than how it compares.
- GuideCompany identifiers explainedCompany number, LEI, CIK, ticker, SIREN and SIRET, DUNS, VAT, EUID and ISIN. What each identifies, who issues it, what it does not guarantee, and which ones actually decide a match.
- GuideWhat is an LEI?The Legal Entity Identifier explained: the twenty-character structure and its check digits, GLEIF and the LOUs, Level 1 and Level 2 data, annual renewal and lapse, and what a lapsed LEI means for matching.
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The other options you are weighing
The other 11 comparisons, on the shelves the hub uses. Four are not vendor contests: two are the options that beat most vendors most of the time — the fuzzy match you already run, and building it yourself — and two are categories we refuse rather than compete in.
Data providers and registers
Resolution engines and platforms
Entity Bind vs Senzing
5/12 rows to themA mature engine you run yourself, at no cost per decision. It resolves what you give it.
Entity Bind vs Splink
5/12 rows to themFree, open source, and it weighs the evidence properly: Fellegi–Sunter, done right. Our scoring stage is the same family.
Entity Bind vs AWS Entity Resolution
5/12 rows to themCheap, inside your own account, and it needs no new vendor. It also matches only what you loaded.
Entity Bind vs Tamr
5/12 rows to themMachine-learning mastering at enterprise scale. It learns your labels — including the wrong ones.
Entity Bind vs MDM platforms
5/12 rows to themThey are the system of record. We are a decision layer beside one, and we write nothing.
What you would otherwise do
Not what we are
Questions about Entity Bind and PermID
Can you return a PermID?
No. No wired source in this deployment supplies the scheme, so the crosswalk reports it as not configured rather than reporting an absence — which is a distinction the crosswalk exists to make, because not configured means nothing here supplies it, while a company that holds no identifier is a different finding entirely. What comes back instead is the LEI, the company number qualified by its issuing register, the CIK, the ticker, VAT and national register numbers, the EUID where a member state issues one, and the EIN for SEC filers.
Should we just use PermID?
If your counterparties are listed issuers, funds or instruments, very likely yes, and it costs nothing. The place it stops being enough is a file of private companies — a supplier master, a customer base, a book of counterparties that never issued a security — where market-linked identity has little to say and the register of incorporation is the only authority. That is the file this is built for.
Is the LEI not the same idea, and already global?
Similar idea, different footprint, and both are narrower than a register. Roughly 3.4 million LEIs have been assigned, about 2.0 million of them with a current (ISSUED) registration, against tens of millions of live companies in the registers we measure alone, so an LEI is definitionally authoritative where one exists and silent everywhere else. That is why the crosswalk is a crosswalk: the LEI, the register-qualified company number, the CIK and the ticker each cover a different slice, and a resolution that depended on any one of them would abstain on most of the world.
We already hold PermIDs. Can we send them?
You can send them and they will be carried on your record as your own supplied fact, ranked in the precedence order where customer-supplied values sit. What they will not do is decide: the deterministic stage acts on schemes it can check for register shape and issuing authority, and an identifier we hold no source for cannot be verified against anything. Treating an unverifiable identifier as decisive is exactly the silent false positive the identifier semantics here exist to prevent.
Settle it against PermID on your own rows.
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