During last meeting the group agreed to narrow down to a couple of focus areas.

The group discussed challenges around linking issuer data from multiple vendors including:

• Data is available from multiple providers; if you use only one data provider the linkage is okay but when you have two or more feeds (e.g. Bloomberg and Reuters) this is more difficult. It is also possible to use LEI but coverage is sparse.
• Linking information from one vendor to another can also cause operational errors.
• Issuer hierarchy can also be problematic given the different ways issuers create notes and identify parents/ultimate parents.
• A member of the group suggested looking at Open Corporates, which looks extensive although it has no obvious hierarchy and no other IDs.
• FactSet confirmed they do use “Open Corporates”, and perhaps we could get vendors to map back to this open ID. The community could then perhaps map back the the hierarchy. 
• FactSet does map open corporate symbol to their own symbol and also maintains hierarchy.
• John Matera offered to look into how FactSet uses Open Corporates (e.g. license) and how good the coverage is.
• It would be appealing if there is a mapping to say 1 open field so that banks/asset managers can use data from multiple vendors more easily .
• The group queried whether vendors would add an open ID to their feeds, would this mapping then be bundled in with other fees? The other option is to open source IDs, e.g. FIGI.
• Someone thought that Bloomberg does have a FIGI at the entity level (to validate).
• Group discussed why is LEI not more widely used? Not clear.

• For banks there might be some official identifier required and that could be an opportunity, e.g. SEC CIK filings is something that identifies a legal entity. Central key that the SEC requires for filing. Anyone issuing securities has to have a CIK. CIK is different from TIN and it can be hard to use these because they are mostly US.

Deep dive - Mapping of CUSIPs to Symbols. Reference to the below use case that was discussed last week -

"CUSIP is also commonly used but is extremely expensive and entities on both sides of a transaction have to be entitled. Also potential issues here where compliance uses CUSIP but a trader uses symbol so can cause errors so potentially not even standard usage within a company. Could CUSIP be open source so there is a single identifier that uniquely connects the securities. "

Explore the use of Open Corporates.