The Financial Instrument Global Identifier (FIGI) is an Object Management Group standard for identifying financial instruments — a permanent, randomly generated 12-character alphanumeric code that never changes and is never reused, carrying no meaning itself and linking to metadata that describes the instrument. It covers all global asset classes, including loans, cryptocurrencies, futures and options, and the data is free under the MIT license through OpenFIGI’s mapping, search and filter APIs. Version 1.3 was published by OMG in September 2026.
FIGI
FIGI is a naming system for financial instruments that solves the mapping problem rather than adding to it. Capital markets run on hundreds of symbologies — exchange tickers, vendor codes, national numbering schemes — and firms spend real money reconciling them through trading, settlement and reporting. A FIGI is a stable anchor those identifiers can be mapped to, and the mapping is published openly.
It is an Object Management Group standard — OMG describes it as specifying “the structure and semantics of Global Identifiers, how they are constructed and validated, and their relationship with other financial information.” The current version, 1.3, is a formal specification published in September 2026 under OMG’s Non-Assert IPR mode, copyright Bloomberg L.P. and OMG.
- Permanent and meaningless by design - A FIGI is 12 alphanumeric characters, randomly generated, with over 300 trillion possible values. Once assigned it never changes through an instrument’s life; when the instrument ceases to exist the FIGI is retired, never reused, and still resolvable. All meaning lives in the metadata, not the code.
- Context, not just identity - The framework relates the same instrument across functional contexts — an obligation itself versus that obligation listed on specific exchanges — so each use case can identify the instrument at the level it needs.
- Coverage where other identifiers stop - FIGI covers all asset classes, including those that typically have no global identifier: loans, cryptocurrencies and exchange pairs, futures and options.
- Open data and an API - OpenFIGI provides the identifiers and metadata free under the MIT license, with mapping, search and filter APIs and examples on GitHub. The API is profiled on APIs.io.
- An ontology, not only a code list - The specification ships machine-readable RDF alongside the document, so FIGI metadata can be linked into knowledge graphs.
- Adopted by issuers of data - OpenFIGI lists its facilitators: Bloomberg L.P. as certified provider, Kaiko, and a long list of exchanges that carry FIGIs in their data, and it tracks the regulatory reporting regimes where FIGI can be used.
Where it sits. FIGI identifies the instrument; the LEI identifies the legal entity that issued or trades it. Together they cover most of the reference data a trade carries, and both are identifiers the messaging standards that move trades — ISO 20022 and FIX — have to carry alongside the older national and vendor codes.
