Alacra, the leader in client onboarding, reference data and business research solutions, today announced the addition of GIINs (Global Intermediary Identifier Number) to the Alacra Authority File Plus (AAF+). GIINs are issued by the IRS to foreign financial institutions (FFIs) as part of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and create reporting and compliance obligations for the organizations with which they do business. There are approximately 140,000 institutions with GIINs, including banks, funds, trusts, asset managers and insurance companies.

The IRS process of assigning GIINs is significantly constrained by a lack of linkages and mapping to any commonly used public identifiers, such as the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and the CIK (Central Index Key). Alacra has moved quickly to help clients by adding all the entities with GIINs to the latest version of the AAF+. Through the AAF+ Alacra provides access to a database of all the rated, regulated and listed entities globally, as well all the entities with LEIs or GIINs. Each entity is cross-mapped to all the public identifiers, as well as proprietary vendor identifiers, such as the BIC (Bank Identifier Code) through an appropriate end-user license.

Alan Samuels, Vice President of Alacra Reference Data Solutions, commented: “The limitations of the IRS provision of GIINs have the potential to adversely impact users. The inconsistent naming conventions, and the lack of additional attribute information can really hamper the correct identification of an entity. Given our knowledge of reference data and excellent search technology I was sure we could do better – and we have. To my knowledge, our new AAF+ is the only solution able to cross-reference and map such a wide range of entity identifiers.”

In addition to the 200,000 rated, regulated and listed entities already held in Alacra’s database the inclusion of unique entities with LEIs and GIINs adds 400,000 entities, taking the AAF+ to around 600,000 entities.