CIK (Central Index Key)
The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. Filed under identifiers.
The keys company data is joined on, who issues each one, and where each stops being unique.
every figure, with its population →What CIK (Central Index Key) means
Every entity that files with the SEC — issuers, funds, investment advisers, individuals filing beneficial ownership reports — is assigned a Central Index Key. It is a plain sequential number, zero-padded in some representations and not others, which is a small but persistent source of join failures.
Its scope is the population that files. A CIK is authoritative for identifying a filer and says nothing about companies that do not file, which is almost all of them. It is also stable across a company's life in a way that names and tickers are not, which makes it the right internal key for a filings pipeline even when the presentation layer shows a ticker.
One subtlety: a CIK identifies a filer rather than a legal person in the register sense. Fund families file many series and classes under related keys, and the mapping between a CIK and a company as a national register would recognise it is not always one to one.
EDGAR is US federal public domain, so the mapping can be published freely. Entity Bind carries CIK as a typed identifier in its crosswalk, sourced from EDGAR. Measured on 6,471 tickered filers with complete rows from that register, 99.91% of names are unique — reported separately from the combined regional figure because Reported beside the combined figure and never blended into it: closed-end fund families at one address measure lower on the digital tier, which is a register-shape finding rather than an engine one.
Where this shows up in Entity Bind
Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price.
- Central Index Key (CIK)One filer. A group whose parent and financing subsidiary both file hold two CIKs, and a filer's name on EDGAR is the filer's name.Open
- Register coverageThe registers the resolver reads, the licence each one publishes under, and how often a live entity's name is unique once it is tidied to a common form.Open
- Reference dataIdentifier crosswalks, where each fact came from, and what a cited fact has to carry to be usable downstream.Open
The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide.
Start freeThe terms next to this one
Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one.
Ticker symbol
A ticker is the short code identifying a security on a particular exchange — a property of a listing rather than of a company, and unambiguous only once the exchange is named.
Crosswalk
A crosswalk is a mapping between the identifier schemes that name the same company in different systems — LEI to company number to CIK to ticker — so that data joined on one key can be joined to data keyed on another.
LEI (Legal Entity Identifier)
The LEI is a 20-character ISO 17442 code identifying a legal entity that participates in financial transactions, issued through the Global LEI Foundation and published as open reference data.
Reference data
Reference data is the slow-changing, externally defined data used to classify and identify things — registers, code lists, identifier schemes — as opposed to the transactional data that refers to it.
Company number
A company number is the identifier a register assigns to a company at incorporation, and it is unique only within the register that issued it — never within a country and never globally.
The other 8 terms on this shelf
The keys company data is joined on, who issues each one, and where each stops being unique.
Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.
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