Reference data
Every identifier a company is known by, each separately cited — and the ones nobody holds.
A payments or reporting deadline that requires a structured identifier your reference data does not carry for every counterparty.
Give the crosswalk any one identifier — an LEI, a company number, a central index key, a ticker, a domain, or a name — and it returns every identifier system the company is known by, each carrying its own citation, licence tier and freshness, plus the systems that were asked and came back empty.
Two pages carry what this one only points at: where assurance stands, and every figure with the population it was measured over.
trust and security →every figure, with its population →On this page
Reference and instrument data teams, capital markets operations, treasury and payments engineers, and anyone maintaining a crosswalk between identifier systems.
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.
How it actually goes wrong
What causes it, what it costs when nobody notices, and the part of it a resolver can reach.
Reference data teams maintain crosswalks between identifier systems, and the work is unglamorous in a way that hides how fragile it is. An LEI here, a company number there, a central index key for the filer, a ticker with an exchange, a national statistical number, a vendor's own proprietary id. Each mapping was established once, by someone, from a source that may or may not be recorded, and the maintenance burden is not the mappings that exist but the ones that quietly stopped being true.
The failure that costs money is not a wrong mapping — those get caught. It is a missing one that reads as a wrong one. A field is empty and nobody can tell whether the company genuinely has no legal entity identifier, or whether the system that would have supplied it was never asked, or was asked and timed out. Those are three different findings with three different remediations, and a null represents all of them identically.
Then a deadline arrives that turns the crosswalk from an internal asset into a hard dependency. A payment message format that will not accept an unstructured address. A regulatory register that wants each counterparty identified by an identifier your master does not hold for a third of them. A reporting obligation that requires the legal entity rather than the trading name. At that point the gaps stop being technical debt and start being a project with a date on it.
If that reads like your week, create your Free workspace and upload a company CSV to see which rows match and which need review. Contact us separately if you want a guided first file.
Start freeISO 20022 CBPR+ structured addresses
Fully unstructured postal addresses are being removed from CBPR+ cross-border payment messages. The removal was scheduled for 14 November 2026; on 27 August 2026 Swift delayed the standards release that carried it, and the Bank of England's notice of the delay names no replacement date. Once it takes effect, a payment carrying a fully unstructured address is rejected by the network rather than by a counterparty, which makes it an operations problem before it is a compliance one.
Repairing an address into a structured one is only safe if you know whose address it is. The entity has to be resolved first — name, identifier and address consistency established against a register — or the repair is a well-formatted guess. That is why this arrives as an entity resolution project despite reading as a formatting one.
The requirement is published by SWIFT as part of the CBPR+ migration, and the delay is the Bank of England's notice of 27 August 2026. The identity framing is ours.
What we do about it
Each of these runs today. Where one needs a column you might not have, or fails in a particular way, the sentence says so.
- 01
The negative is a finding
The response distinguishes two kinds of absence explicitly. `not_found` means a wired source supplies that scheme and had no value for this company. `not_configured` means no wired source supplies it at all. Collapse those into one empty field and "this company has no LEI" becomes indistinguishable from "we never asked" — and only the first is a fact about the company. A reference data load needs the negative as much as the positive. - 02
Per-identifier citation, not per-record
Each identifier carries the fact that supplied it: source id, source URL, when it was retrieved, when it was first seen, when it was last confirmed and how many confirmations there have been, its licence tier and whether you may resell it. A company number entry is qualified by its jurisdiction and a ticker by its exchange — and a ticker is qualified only from an exchange fact that came from the same source, rather than by pairing two facts that happen to sit on the same record. - 03
Identifiers checked as identifiers
An LEI is validated against its published checksum before it is trusted. A registration number is interpreted through its issuing register rather than as a string: two numbers that align character for character except for one visually confusable glyph refuse to decide, and a number whose authority is a bare country code refuses when its shape does not say which register issued it. A bare "US" registration authority is correctly refused, because a US number is decisive only with its register stated. - 04
Ownership as a projection, never a resolution
The walk goes one hop by default and up to ten on request, and it moves only on exact identifiers and authority-scoped registration numbers held inside your own tenant — never on a name, and never across tenants. It is cycle-safe and bounded at 250 identifier attempts, nodes and edges, and when it hits that budget it says so rather than truncating silently. What it did not walk is always populated, so you cannot infer depth from an empty field. - 05
Licence carried through the whole chain
A derived value cannot launder a licence tier: the licence on a derivation is the most restrictive of its inputs, its confidence is at most the minimum input confidence, and its freshness is the stalest input's. That is what makes a per-field resale flag meaningful rather than decorative, and it is enforced at the persistence boundary rather than in a contract.
Which of these is your export?
One export usually sits in three of these at once. Your rate is set by the columns still standing once the names have been stripped back to a comparable form.
An LEI
Checksum-validated and decided deterministically. The global LEI record is CC0, so everything derived from it is resale-safe by construction.
Measured100% (317/317).
A company number with its jurisdiction
Decides where the register is unambiguous. Worth knowing that jurisdiction alone does not make a company number unique: there are 1,071 business registers across 232 jurisdictions, German register numbers are court-qualified and Poland runs three parallel number spaces, so the pipeline qualifies numbers by their issuing register rather than by country.
No published rateThis shape has not been measured on a published fixture, so the behaviour above carries no rate.
A ticker, an exchange, or a central index key
Resolved against the US filer set. One caveat to size before you rely on it: closed-end fund families share near-identical names at one address, which measured materially worse on the wide digital tier than the UK baseline, and we make no quality claim for SEC filers until that recording leg runs.
MeasuredUnited States (filers): 6,471 tickered filers with complete rows, 99.91% name uniqueness. 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.
A legal name plus a country
Viable in high-uniqueness registers and structurally weak in low-uniqueness ones. This is the input shape where the register census matters more than the engine.
MeasuredName uniqueness by register: United States (filers) 99.91%, United Kingdom 99.53%, Norway 97.78%, United States 97.76%, France 67.96%.
- Identifier — A company number or an LEI
- 100% 317/317
Zero wrong bindings were observed across the historical six-shape recording and the separate domain fixture. Observed correctness was 1.0000 on accepted outcomes; this does not guarantee an error-free new workload.
317 live GB companies sampled from the 2026-08-01 Companies House snapshot, with same-name siblings included. Identifier-rich arrivals seed the catalogue before the weaker input shapes are evaluated. Historical results on an internal UK fixture with a preloaded catalogue. The September 5 replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot establish current calibration. No independent customer holdout or global coverage claim. The whole table, including the shapes this page does not use, with the safety results and an account of what none of it demonstrates.
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.
Not sure which of these your export is? Create your Free workspace and inspect your own CSV columns. For an assisted composition preview, contact us with the file: we tier each row by its strongest surviving signal before quoting a Sprint.
Start freeOne LEI in, four identifier systems out, one gap named
One pass, in order, including the rows that do not resolve. The interesting rows are always the ones at the end.
A single legal entity identifier, with a request for one hop of ownership.
- 01The identifier decides deterministically against the global LEI record, with no model call and no scoring.
- 02The crosswalk assembles every identifier the entity holds, each from the fact that supplied it: the LEI itself, the company number qualified by its jurisdiction, the central index key, and the ticker qualified by its exchange.
- 03The direct parent is read from the LEI system's relationship record and carries the relationship endpoint as its citation.
- 04The systems that were asked and returned nothing are enumerated, each with a status distinguishing a source that had no value from a scheme no source in this deployment supplies.
An identifier map where every row can be opened in a browser, a one-hop ownership edge stating its basis and its certainty, and an explicit statement of what was asked and came back empty.
The last part is the one that changes a reconciliation. A crosswalk that returns four identifiers and silence about the fifth cannot be reconciled; one that returns four identifiers and the sentence "no source in this deployment supplies that scheme" can be, because the gap is now assigned to a source rather than to the company.
That example is ours. The one worth having is the same walk-through on eight rows of yours.
Start freePrefer to put it to a person? Talk to us instead →
What this will not do
Each of these is a decision we intend to keep. Read them before you scope the work.
- There is no D-U-N-S coverage. The crosswalk answers `not_configured` for it, because no wired source supplies it — a D-U-N-S number is a commercial identifier and open supply is effectively absent.
- CUSIP and SEDOL are absent by design rather than by omission: their terms prohibit maintaining a master file of the numbers, which makes them pass-through material the persistence layer would refuse to store. ISIN is specified but blocked pending legal advice.
- The identifier vocabulary is narrower than the list of identifier-ish attributes the data model carries. VAT numbers and successor LEIs are held but are not yet first-class crosswalk schemes.
- A parent from the LEI system means accounting consolidation, not majority ownership, and rendering it as equivalent to a credit bureau's parent would be wrong. Subsidiary lists are complete only with respect to entities that hold an LEI.
- Industry classifications crosswalked between schemes are lossy and are marked as such. A US SIC to NACE mapping is a three-hop chain starting from a non-standard variant, so the recommendation is two-digit division only, at low confidence.
- Nothing revalidates on a cadence. Freshness advances when a resolution re-observes a value, and a background revalidation job does not exist.
We will not tell you how many dangerous merges we will find
We do not promise a count of dangerous merges prevented, and you should distrust anyone who does before they have seen your file. Zero is a normal, honest result: two rows carrying contradicting company numbers are refused outright and never reach the guard that would have counted them.
What this product does not have — no SOC 2, no external validation of the accuracy figures, no customer holdout — is published in full, with the retention, erasure and tenancy detail a security review asks for. Read the trust page →
Check these scope limits before integrating. Free signup lets you inspect your own company CSV; if a requirement falls outside the published scope, contact us and we will tell you whether it is supported.
Start freeThe method behind this, at length
4 articles that carry the working this page summarises.
- 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.
- 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.
- GuideThe DORA register of informationWhat the register demands, why only 6.5% of almost 1,000 dry-run registers passed all 116 data quality checks, and the provider identity problem that explains most of the failures.
The same pipeline, in other people's words
One product, described 6 other ways. If your team has a different vocabulary for the same file, start from the page that speaks it.
Audit company overlap before a CRM migration
Review duplicate companies across both exports while every source ID is still intact.
CRM and RevOps
Which accounts are one company, which merges to refuse, and a receipt for both.
Master data management
An independent admission policy beside the platform you already run.
Supplier master and accounts payable
Duplicate vendors, remittance conflicts and concentration you cannot see.
KYC and onboarding
Counterparty identity with a receipt that survives seven years.
AI agents
A counterparty check before the agent acts, and a receipt for what it acted on.
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 →
Questions about reference data
Is this a bulk identifier file we can download?
No. It is an API and an MCP tool that resolves a company and returns its identifier map, plus an export of your own tenant's catalogue in NDJSON. Selling raw access to public registry, LEI or address data is explicitly not the product — that material is already open and you can take it yourself. What is on offer is the resolution step and the evidence around it, which is the part that is hard.
What does the crosswalk cost?
It is billed exactly like a resolve, because it is a resolve — the identifier projection on top of it is free. So an identifier in costs one credit at the deterministic stage; a name that has to be adjudicated costs five; and a name that cannot be decided costs nothing and comes back as a shortlist. Reading the identifier map back for an entity you already hold is free and unmetered, on both the HTTP and the MCP surface.
How do we tell a missing identifier from a company that has none?
That distinction is in the payload rather than in a support conversation. Each empty scheme comes back with a status: `not_found` where a wired source supplies the scheme and had no value, `not_configured` where nothing in the deployment supplies it, `not_checked`, or `source_unavailable`. Four different remediations, four different words. It is the single feature most worth checking in an evaluation, because it is the one a reference data team can act on immediately.
Can we resell the identifiers you return?
The open-licensed subset, on the plan that carries resale rights, with attribution. Each field reports whether its own licence permits resale and whether your plan bought that right, and the two are reported separately because they answer different questions. The enforcement is a write-path refusal rather than a clause: the repository raises before any write on a fact whose licence forbids warehousing, and the step that picks which value wins drops that material before a golden record is assembled.
Do you support as-of queries?
Partially, and the difference matters for a reconciliation. The crosswalk accepts an as-of date for source-effective dating, and every fact carries validity dates where the source publishes them plus its own first-seen, last-confirmed and confirmation count. That lets you read a fact's own temporal claims. It does not give you a full history of our catalogue as it stood on an arbitrary past date — a bitemporal store — and there is not one behind this.