The FIGI structure is defined and copyrighted by the
Object Management Group.
Bloomberg L.P. is the
Registration Authority and
Certified Provider of the standard. FIGI have been created for more than 300 million unique securities, representing most asset classes of the financial markets. The FIGI is a 12-character alpha-numerical code that does not contain information characterizing financial instruments, but serves for uniform unique global identification. Once issued, a FIGI is never reused and represents the same instrument in perpetuity. Unique FIGIs identify securities as well as individual exchanges on which they trade. Composite FIGIs are also issued to represent unique securities across related exchanges. For instance,
Apple Inc. common stock trades on 14
exchanges in the
United States. There exists a unique FIGI to identify the common stock on each individual exchange, but also a composite FIGI to represent the company's common stock traded on United States exchanges.
Equity Levels of Assignment • Global Share Class Level • Country Composite Level • Exchange/Venue Level
FIGI Structure A FIGI consists of three parts: A two-character prefix, a 'G' as the third character; an eight character alpha-numeric code which does not contain English vowels "A", "E", "I", "O", or "U"; and a single
check digit. In total, the encoding supports more than 852 billion potential values, under the initial BBG prefix. In total, there are over 330 trillion potential available identifiers.
Structural Rules The permissible characters for use within a FIGI are a subset of
ISO 8859-1 as follows: • All upper case ISO 8859-1 consonant (including Y). • The single-digit integers 0 – 9. While the string itself is semantically meaningless, there is a specific structure that is used. The syntax rules for the twelve characters are as follows: • Characters 1 and 2: * Any combination of upper case consonants with the following exceptions: * BS, BM, GG, GB, GH, KY, VG The purpose of the restriction is to reduce the chances that the resulting identifier may be identical to an ISIN string. (Strictly speaking, a duplicate is not a problem as the strings designate different things, but care has been taken to reduce ambiguity.) The way that ISIN is constructed is that the first two characters correspond to the country of issuance. The third character, depending on the issuing organization, is typically a numeral. However, in the case of the United Kingdom, the letter "G" is assigned. As we are using the letter "G" as our third character (see below), the only combinations that may come up within ISIN that only incorporates consonants are BSG (Bahamas), BMG (Bermuda), GGG (Guernsey), GBG (United Kingdom) and VGG (British Virgin Islands). The reason for this is that the United Kingdom issues ISIN numbers for entities within its broader jurisdiction. • Character 3: * The upper case letter G (for "global") • Characters 4 – 11: * Any combination of upper case consonants and the numerals 0 – 9 • Character 12: * A check digit (0 – 9) which is calculated as follows: Letters are converted to integers using a letter to integer look-up table provided in section 7.2.1 of the specification. Using the first 11 characters and beginning at the last character, map the character to its specific integer value from the look-up table, if the character is already a digit, use that value. Then, working right to left, multiply every second integer by two. Next, separate numbers greater than 10 into two separate digits (e.g., 57 becomes 5 and 7) add up all the integer values, each less than 10 now. Finally, subtract that summed value from the next higher integer ending in zero (e.g., If the summed value is 72, then 80 is the next higher integer ending in 0, and the check digit is 8). If the summed value of the digits is a number ending in zero, then the check digit is also zero. This process is similar to other financial instrument identifier check digit calculations but specifically chosen to reduce the chances of other schemes from validating versus this FIGI scheme.
Issuance Unique FIGIs are published by Bloomberg L.P. and datasets are both searchable and available for download via the Bloomberg OpenFIGI website. FIGIs are never reused and once issued, represent an instrument in perpetuity. An instrument's FIGI never changes as a result of any corporate action. == License ==