Trade identifiers

A firm's own trade id names a trade inside that firm. Two counterparties reporting the same trade to a repository need one identifier that both of them use, and a regulator needs to match the two reports against each other. UTI and USI are the codes that serve that purpose.

These codes identify the trade, which is one of the three scopes in trade modeling. They say nothing about what was traded, and standard financial identifiers answer that separate question.

A trade id is allocated by the system that books the trade, so two firms on opposite sides of one trade allocate different ids. A trade repository receiving both reports cannot pair them without a value that both firms agree on beforehand.

The identifier therefore has to be allocated once, by one of the two parties, and carried by both. Which party allocates it is itself a rule, because both firms allocating would reproduce the problem.

ISO 23897 defines the Unique Trade Identifier, and the CPMI-IOSCO technical guidance on harmonisation sets the allocation rules the standard implements.

A UTI is up to fifty-two characters. The first twenty are the Legal Entity Identifier of the entity that generated it, and the remainder is a value unique within that entity. Prefixing with the LEI makes the code globally unique without a central allocator, because each generating entity is already uniquely named.

The guidance sets a waterfall determining which counterparty generates the UTI, so that exactly one of the two does. The waterfall runs through the clearing house, the trading venue, and then rules based on the counterparties' identifiers.

The Unique Swap Identifier is the earlier scheme, introduced under the United States Dodd-Frank reporting rules and overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. A USI combines a namespace derived from the registered entity that created it with a value unique within that namespace.

USI solved the same matching problem within one jurisdiction. UTI generalised it, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's later rewrite moved United States reporting onto UTI, so USI now appears mainly on trades booked before that change.

ores_trading_trade_id_types_tbl registers the schemes, and it currently seeds two values, UTI and USI. trade_id_type models that table.

A trade carries its identifiers in trade_identifier, which holds a scheme and a value per row, so one trade can carry a UTI and a USI at once. The firm's own trade id stays on the trade itself, because it is not one of these schemes.

The LEI that prefixes a UTI names a legal entity, and lei_entity models the reference data behind it.

The two schemes are described from the standard and the regulators' published rules: ISO 23897 and the CPMI-IOSCO technical guidance for UTI, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's reporting rules for USI. This page cites no edition or clause for any of them.

• Trade — the structure note that orders this cluster, and where to read this page in it.
• Standard financial identifiers — the codes that name a security, a party or a venue rather than a deal.
• Trade modeling — the four entities; these codes identify the trade.
• Trade Status State Machine — the lifecycle the identified trade runs through.
• Knowledge — the hub of all knowledge notes.