Entity resolution
Deciding whether two records from different sources describe the same company or person.
Updated 2026-07-26
Sources rarely share identifiers. One publishes a CIK, another a CUSIP, a third only a name and a country. Linking them is a decision, and every such decision can be wrong.
The order matters. A match on a strong identifier is accepted; a match on name alone is not, and for sanctions data it is never accepted automatically, because a wrong link there attaches a designation to an innocent party.
Records we cannot link with confidence stay unlinked and are shown as filed. An unlinked record is a small inconvenience; a wrongly linked one is a false statement about a real person.
Related terms
5 entries- CIK
- The permanent numeric identifier the SEC assigns to every filer — company, fund or individual.
- CUSIP
- A nine-character identifier for a specific security issued in the United States or Canada.
- Deduplication key
- A stable key derived from a record's own contents so that reprocessing the same source does not create a second copy.
- False positive
- A search result that resembles the query but refers to a different person or entity.
- LEI
- A twenty-character global identifier for a legal entity that takes part in financial transactions.
Where this appears in the data
Written for reading the records published here. This is not a legal, tax or accounting definition, and where a jurisdiction defines the term precisely, that definition governs.