Office of Financial Research and University of Maryland Announce Financial Entity Identification and Information Integration Challenge

Published: November 16, 2015

The Office of Financial Research (OFR) and the University of Maryland (UMD) are jointly announcing a challenge for research teams to link four disparate financial datasets.

The goal of the Financial Entity Identification and Information Integration (FEIII) Challenge is for information specialists to develop technologies that automatically align diverse financial entity identification schemes from four key regulatory datasets.

The techniques should enhance the toolkit for researchers, industry participants, and regulators who regularly bring together and align data from a broad array of sources, including financial firms’ internal systems, regulatory collections, and public websites. Tools to improve the efficiency and accuracy of these data alignments will be an important building block for a more resilient financial system.

The challenge is a multiyear program to improve the methods of identifying and linking information about financial counterparties contained in complex datasets.

The challenge will involve solving a record linkage task across four datasets:

  1. Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council Reports of Condition and Income (FFIEC Call Reports).
  2. Company information from the Securities and Exchange Commission Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval system (SEC EDGAR).
  3. A member list from the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLB).
  4. Legal entity identifier (LEI) information assembled by the Office of Financial Research.

The OFR has funded the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to manage a grant to UMD to run the challenge. The full organizing committee is listed below. The organizations have been collaborating with subject matter experts from federal regulatory agencies and the financial industry, including computer and information scientists.

The difficulty of precisely identifying different parts of a financial institution, due to complex organizational structures and similar names, can lead to problems in linking financial datasets to one another, identifying counterparties, and cross-referencing data. The financial crisis demonstrated the need for a global identifier system for risk management and regulatory oversight. The OFR has led the global efforts to create the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), a unique, 20-digit identifier, like a bar code, for identifying all the legal entities involved in the thousands of financial transactions that happen around the world every day.

Broader adoption of the LEI and alignment of the different identifiers used by regulators would facilitate cross-referencing for industry practitioners and researchers to track the complex hierarchies and networks of ownership, and control of corporations and holding companies. This ability to cross-reference would benefit financial institutions, data providers, and academic researchers, as well as the regulatory community.

The FEIII Challenge will bring together teams of researchers to create and curate a reference financial entity identifier knowledge base linking four heterogeneous collections of financial entity identifiers. Such a knowledge base will help to overcome a fundamental roadblock to information integration by resolving mentions or references to the same financial entity among financial contracts, regulatory filings, news articles, and social media outlets.

The OFR and NIST will be producing the reference data used in scoring results. Scores and data will be returned to participants, released to all participants at a workshop at the end of the challenge, and released to the public afterward.

###Organizing Committee

  • Mark Flood, OFR
  • John Grant, UMD
  • Haiping Luo, OFR
  • Louiqa Raschid, UMD
  • Ian Soboroff, NIST
  • Kyungjin Yoo, UMD

###Timeline

  • Task guidelines and data release: November 15, 2015
  • Example ground truth release: January 15, 2016
  • Deadline for submission of results: March 15, 2016
  • Evaluation scores and ground truth released to participants: April 15, 2016
  • One page report from invited participants: May 6, 2016
  • Workshop report from organizers: May 6, 2016
  • Workshop event: Friday July 1, 2016

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act established the OFR within the U.S. Department of the Treasury to support the Financial Stability Oversight Council, its member organizations, and the public by improving the quality, transparency, and accessibility of financial data and information; conducting and sponsoring research related to financial stability; and promoting best practices in risk management.

More information about the challenge is available at: https://ir.nist.gov/dsfin/.

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