The acronym CUSIP historically refers to the Committee on Uniform Security Identification Procedures, which was founded in 1964, during the paper crunch in Wall Street. This 9-character alphanumeric
Alphanumeric
Alphanumeric is a combination of alphabetic and numeric characters, and is used to describe the collection of Latin letters and Arabic digits or a text constructed from this collection. There are either 36 or 62 alphanumeric characters. The alphanumeric character set consists of the numbers 0 to...
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
A security is generally a fungible, negotiable financial instrument representing financial value. Securities are broadly categorized into:* debt securities ,* equity securities, e.g., common stocks; and,...
In banking and finance, clearing denotes all activities from the time a commitment is made for a transaction until it is settled. Clearing is necessary because the speed of trades is much faster than the cycle time for completing the underlying transaction....
Settlement of securities is a business process whereby securities or interests in securities are delivered, usually against payment of money, to fulfill contractual obligations, such as those arising under securities trades....
Standard & Poor's is a United States-based financial services company. It is a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies that publishes financial research and analysis on stocks and bonds. It is well known for its stock-market indices, the US-based S&P 500, the Australian S&P/ASX 200, the Canadian...
. The CUSIP Service Bureau acts as the National Numbering Association (NNA
NNA
NNA is a three-letter abbreviation with several meanings:* Kenitra Airport the IATA code for this Moroccan airport* National Newspaper Association, an American organization for community newspapers...
A National Securities Identifying Number or NSIN is a generic nine-digit alpha numeric code which identifies a fungible security. The NSIN is issued by a national numbering agency designated for that country. Regional substitute NNAs have been allocated the task of functioning as NNAs in those...
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
.
In the 1980s there was an attempt to expand the CUSIP system for international securities as well. The resulting CINS (CUSIP International Numbering System) has seen little use as it was introduced at about the same time as the truly international ISIN system. CINS identifiers do appear in the ISIDPlus
ISIDPlus
ISIDPlus is a comprehensive database of global security identifiers, cross-referencing more than one million issues. The database is co-produced by Standard & Poor's and SIX Telekurs....
directory, however.
Description
The first six characters are known as the base (or CUSIP-6), and uniquely identify the issuer. Issuer codes are assigned alphabetically from a series that includes deliberate built-in "gaps" for future expansion. The 7th and 8th digit identify the exact issue. The 9th digit is an automatically generated checksum (some clearing bodies ignore or truncate the last digit). The last three characters of the issuer code can be letters, in order to provide more room for expansion.
Issuer numbers 990 to 999 and 99A to 99Z in each group of 1,000 numbers are reserved for internal use. This permits a user to assign an issuer number to any issuer which might be relevant to his holdings but which does not qualify for coverage under the CUSIP numbering system. Other issuer numbers (990000 to 999999 and 99000A to 99999Z) are also reserved for the user so that they may be assigned to non-security assets or to number miscellaneous internal assets.
The 7th and 8th digit identify the exact issue, the format being dependent on the type of security. In general, numbers are used for equities and letters are used for fixed income. For commercial paper the first issue character is generated by taking the letter code of the maturity month, the second issue character is the day of the maturity date, with letters used for numbers over 9. The first security issued by any particular issuer is numbered "10". Newer issues are numbered by adding ten to the last used number up to 80, at which point the next issue is "88" and then goes down by tens. The issue number "01" is used to label all options on equities from that issuer.
Fixed income issues are labeled using a similar fashion, but due to there being so many of them they use letters instead of digits. The first issue is labeled "AA", the next "A2", then "2A" and onto "A3". To avoid confusion, the letters I and O are not used since they might be mistaken for the digits 1 and 0.
The 9th digit is an automatically generated check digit
Check digit
A check digit is a form of redundancy check used for error detection, the decimal equivalent of a binary checksum. It consists of a single digit computed from the other digits in the message....
using the "Modulus 10 Double Add Double" technique. To calculate the check digit every second digit is multiplied by two. Letters are converted to numbers based on their ordinal position in the alphabet.
Check digit pseudocode
algorithm Cusip-Check-Digit(cusip) is Input: an 8-character CUSIP Output: the check digit for that CUSIP
sum := 0 for 1 ≤ i ≤ 8 do c := the ith character of cusip ifc is a digit then v := numeric value of the digit c else ifc is a letter then p := ordinal position of c in the alphabet (A=1, B=2...) v := p + 9 else ifc = "*" then v := 36 else ifc = "@" then v := 37 else ifc = "#" then v := 38 end if
ifi is eventhen v := v × 2 end if
sum := sum + vdiv 10 + vmod 10 repeat
return (10 - (summod 10)) mod 10 end function
Check digit Pseudocode (VBA)
Public Function CUSIP(ByVal CUSIPCode As String) As Integer
Dim sumof As Integer
Dim s As String
Dim v as Integer
If Len(CUSIPCode) <> 8 Then Exit Function
For i = 1 To 8
s = Mid(CUSIPCode, i, 1)
If s >= "0" And s <= "9" Then
v = CInt(s)
ElseIf s >= "A" And s <= "Z" Then
v = CInt(Asc(s) - 55)
ElseIf s = "*" Then
v = 36
ElseIf s = "@" Then
v = 37
ElseIf s = "#" Then
v = 38
End If
If i Mod 2 = 0 Then
v = v * 2
End If
sumof = sumof + WorksheetFunction.Quotient(v, 10) + (v Mod 10)
Next i
CUSIP = (10 - (sumof Mod 10)) Mod 10
End Function
Antitrust Review
In November 2009, ten months after launching an investigation, the European Commission formally charged Standard & Poor’s with abusing its position as the sole provider of CUSIP international securities identification codes for U.S. securities by requiring European financial firms and data vendors to pay licensing fees for their use. “This behavior amounts to unfair pricing,” the European Commission said in its statement of objections which lays the groundwork for an adverse finding against S&P. “The (numbers) are indispensable for a number of operations that financial institutions carry out – for instance, reporting to authorities or clearing and settlement – and cannot be substituted.”
S&P has run the CUSIP Service Bureau, the only ISIN issuer in the US, on behalf of the American Bankers Association. In its formal statement of objections, the European Commission alleges that S&P is abusing this monopoly position by forcing financial services companies and information service providers to pay licence fees for the use of US ISINs. It claims that comparable agencies elsewhere in the world either do not charge fees at all, or do so on the basis of distribution cost, rather than usage.
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International Securities Identifying Number (ISIN)
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ISO 6166 defines the structure of an International Securities Identifying Number . An ISIN uniquely identifies a fungible security. Securities with which ISINs can be used are Equities, Fixed income & ETF's only....
A National Securities Identifying Number or NSIN is a generic nine-digit alpha numeric code which identifies a fungible security. The NSIN is issued by a national numbering agency designated for that country. Regional substitute NNAs have been allocated the task of functioning as NNAs in those...
A stock symbol or ticker symbol is a short abbreviation used to uniquely identify publicly traded shares of a particular stock on a particular stock market. A stock symbol may consist of letters, numbers or a combination of both. "Ticker symbol" refers to the symbols that were printed on the ticker...
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