The complexity of reference data (a.k.a static data) is an ever-growing problem and cost center for most investment firms. Every day thousands of new legal entities, securities, and listings are created across the globe that need to be considered.

The rise of ESG has been of no help to the problem, as ESG data may be reported on different layers of corporate structure with different identifiers.

This is also a major problem in the fixed-income space where securities are often issued at different corporate levels and/or via SPVs (Special Purpose Vehicles).

To cope with this problem, investment firms spend hundreds if not millions of €/$ in buying reference data feeds and on internal teams, aiming to achieve some exhaustivity and coherence among and between entities, securities, and listings to properly manage their investments.

A major step to tackle this problem was the creation of the GLEIF (Global Legal Entity Foundation by International authorities). It provides a daily update list of +20M of LEIs (legal entity identifiers) that identify issuing entities across the globe along with their relevant attributes and 80M+ relations between LEIs and ISINs (International Securities Identification Numbering systems) for securities identification.

It is a reliable and comprehensive reference data solution to identify and manage not only the issuing entities, but also the relation between parent and child entities, and between issuing entities and their issued securities.

ResearchPool has now made available the GLEIF reference data on ResearchPool applications enabling clients’ users to retrieve any internal and external content, data, and activities under a unique issuer umbrella. Users can also locate issuers using stock tickers that they often use as proxies to identify issuers.

More solutions to come to empower the financial ecosystem to unlock unforeseen operational efficiency and deliver better performance for the benefit of investors’ journey.