About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Kaiko and Bloomberg Promote Standards for Digital Asset Markets with Release of Financial Instrument Global Identifiers for Crypto Assets

Subscribe to our newsletter

Kaiko, a cryptocurrency market data provider, is bringing Bloomberg’s Financial Instrument Global Identifier (FIGI) into play as a means of identifying crypto assets and enabling greater interoperability between industry participants including digital asset exchanges, data aggregators, custodians, service providers and regulators. The companies’ first move is the release of a batch of FIGIs for all Bitcoin and Ethereum instruments denominated in fiat currencies.

As well as being a step up for the FIGI, the use of the identifier for crypto assets is an early push towards meeting the need for standardisation across digital asset markets to ensure consistency, transparency and greater efficiency.

The FIGI was designated an open standard by the Object Management Group (OMG) back in 2015 and acts as a unique identifier of financial instruments including equities, derivatives, bonds, municipals, and currencies. In September 2021, the FIGI was accredited as a US national standard by the Accredited Standards Committee X9 Inc. Earlier this year, Kaiko was approved by OMG as a certified provider of Crypto FIGIs working alongside Bloomberg as the registration authority for the identifiers.

FIGIs will be assigned at three levels of granularity – asset, currency pair, and trading platform – to provide market participants with greater transparency and a broader view across the sector. The FIGI standard will be compatible with and complement alternative standards. For example, each instrument assigned a FIGI may also be tied at the asset level to an International Securities Identification Number (ISIN) with appropriate licensing or other identifiers, such as the ISO’s planned Digital Token Identifier (DTI).

Ambre Soubiran, CEO at Kaiko, says: “The lack of taxonomy, regulatory, and classification standards is one of the cryptocurrency industry’s greatest pain points today. FIGIs for crypto assets will vastly improve interoperability between service providers and bring much-needed uniformity to the sector.”

Endorsing the use of FIGIs as crypto identifiers, Ian Rogers, chief experience officer at Ledger, provider of a crypto hardware wallet, says: “Ledger products support more than 3,000 crypto assets. The ability to identify these assets and fetch key data is critical to our success A single unified instrument code will not only greatly improve our scalability and resilience, but also bring high value to our users. FIGI is a much needed initiative in the crypto industry.”

Stéphane Duzan, chief operating officer of Société Générale – Forge, comments: “Consistent standards and market practices, such as the open source initiatives FIGI and CAST Framework, are essential to achieving digital assets adoption. FIGI fosters product identification of digital assets by providing the industry with unified identifiers at a global scale.”

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: How to maximise the use of data standards and identifiers beyond compliance and in the interests of the business

Date: 18 July 2024 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes Data standards and identifiers have become common currency in regulatory compliance, bringing with them improved transparency, efficiency and data quality in reporting. They also contribute to automation. But their value does not end here, with data standards and identifiers...

BLOG

J.P. Morgan Expands Fusion to Provide Cloud-Native Custody, Fund Accounting and Middle Office Data to Institutional Investors

J.P. Morgan has added securities services for institutional investors to its data mesh, enabling investors to retrieve investment data held by J.P. Morgan’s custody, fund accounting and middle office services using cloud-native channels including REST APIs, Jupyter notebooks and the Snowflake financial services data cloud. The securities services are available through Fusion by J.P. Morgan,...

EVENT

RegTech Summit New York

Now in its 8th year, the RegTech Summit in New York will bring together the regtech ecosystem to explore how the North American capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to drive innovation, cut costs and support regulatory change.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2023 – Eleventh Edition

Welcome to the eleventh edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook, a popular publication that covers new regulations in capital markets, tracks regulatory change, and provides advice on the data, data management and implementation requirements of more than 30 regulations across UK, European, US and Asia-Pacific capital markets. This edition of the handbook includes new...