Crosswalk
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 crosswalk means
A crosswalk is a table saying which identifiers name the same company. It is needed because no single identifier covers company data: a regulatory dataset is keyed on LEI, a register extract on the company number, a filings feed on CIK, a market feed on ticker and exchange, and the supplier master on whatever the vendor onboarding form captured. A crosswalk is the table that lets those be joined, and building one is an entity resolution problem wearing a reference-data hat.
Two properties decide whether a crosswalk is usable. Every mapping needs a source, because a crosswalk row is an assertion that two identifiers name the same legal person and that assertion can be wrong. And every identifier needs its issuing authority attached, because a bare number is unique only within the scheme that issued it.
The mappings also decay. Companies merge, are struck off, re-register, and change listing venue; a crosswalk assembled once and never revisited quietly accumulates rows that were true and are not.
In a warehouse a crosswalk is usually the deliverable rather than a by-product: one row per source row, carrying the system, that system's own key, the entity it resolved to, the confidence and the decision id. Marts join to it instead of to a cleaned-up name column, so a grouping that turns out to be wrong is one mapping row to change. The step-by-step version is written for the analyst whose deliverable it is.
Entity Bind assembles crosswalks from sources that publish the mapping themselves wherever possible — GLEIF, for instance, publishes its own mapping to several external schemes under CC0 — and cites the contributor for each mapping rather than presenting a consolidated row with no origin. Identifier-tier and digital-tier behaviour has been measured across United Kingdom, United States (Colorado) and EMEA (France and Norway). at a combined 0.999955 against a 0.9565 bar. Measured with no model spend at all, on identifier and digital tiers plus retrieval and fragmentation, using the same seeded, sibling-complete builder in every register. It does not carry the live-adjudicated name tiers across, which rest on jurisdiction-free calibration keys and have been recorded in the UK only.
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.
- Reference dataIdentifier crosswalks, where each fact came from, and what a cited fact has to carry to be usable downstream.Open
- The API referenceThe REST surface: payloads, the decision outcomes, the error model, the usage block and the ceiling on the confidence field.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
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.
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.
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.
CIK (Central Index Key)
The CIK is the number the US Securities and Exchange Commission assigns to every filer in its EDGAR system, and it is the join key for anything derived from US securities filings.
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.
D-U-N-S number
The D-U-N-S number is a nine-digit identifier assigned by a commercial data provider to business establishments worldwide, and it is proprietary: it can be matched on and cannot be derived from open 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.
Provenance
Provenance is the record of where each individual value came from — which source, retrieved when, effective when — attached to the value itself rather than to the dataset as a whole.
- 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.
- IdentifierLEIOne LEI names one legal entity worldwide, and most companies hold none. An agreeing LEI settles a match with no model call, a conflicting one against.
- GuideISO 20022 structured address requirementsCBPR+ payment messages are to stop accepting fully unstructured postal addresses. Swift delayed the 14 November 2026 date on 27 August 2026. What changes, and the identity work it forces.
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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