SIREN and SIRET
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 SIREN and SIRET means
INSEE assigns a SIREN to every legal unit in France and a SIRET to each of its establishments, the SIRET being the SIREN plus a five-digit establishment code. Choosing the wrong one is a category error with visible consequences: joining on SIRET fragments a company across its branches, and joining on SIREN collapses distinct sites that a logistics or tax process needs to keep apart.
The data is published as open data through the SIRENE database under Licence Ouverte 2.0, which makes it unusually easy to work with by European standards.
France is also the register where name matching most obviously fails, and it is the clearest available demonstration that resolution quality is a property of the register as much as of the engine. On SIRENE's 5,841,117 legal persons, only 67.96% of names are unique. A third of French companies share their exact name — 1,003 live companies sit on one name. A French file needs a town or postcode column, and with one it measured 2,998 of 3,000 on the postcode tier.
The practical instruction that follows is concrete: a French file needs a town, a postcode or a SIREN column, and a vendor quoting a single global match rate that does not vary by register has not measured 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.
- SIREN and SIRET (SIREN / SIRET)SIREN identifies the legal unit — the company. SIRET identifies one establishment of it: a site, a branch, a shop. They are not interchangeable, and the difference…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.
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.
u-probability
The u-probability of a comparison field is the probability that the field agrees by chance given that the pair is not a match — a measure of how common a value is, and therefore of how little an agreement proves.
Fragmentation
Fragmentation is the opposite failure to over-merging: one real entity split across several clusters, so the same company is counted, contracted with or invoiced more than once.
VAT number
A VAT number is a tax registration identifier issued by a national tax authority, checkable against the EU's validation service for member states, and a strong but imperfect proxy for company identity.
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.
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.
Start with your own company records.
Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration.
300 credits. No card.
For a guided review of your file, explore the Merge Safety Sprint →