Securities Reference API

A Brief History

Many of our clients have asked if we provide a “security master”. The short answer is “No, we don’t”. But it begs the question, “what problem are they trying to solve?”. We have learned that many of our clients have disparate datasets in addition to the custodian data they receive from us. This creates a challenge with security instrument data elements such as symbols, descriptions and security types being different among these datasets. The intended solution was to use a “security master” as the source of truth for normalization.

Custodians have a distinct list of all the securities for which they hold positions. One can think of this as more of a stock record or stock inventory. Some provide this information in a file called “security master” but it really only represents the securities they hold. It does not cover every possible security. 

The custodians only send a subset of those securities based on the accounts advisors have authorized to share with vendors. As such, BridgeFT only receives a fraction of the custodian’s stock record. 

The Securities Reference API is Born

Once we learned that our clients were looking for a way to normalize security instrument data elements, we set off to design a solution to help with this use case. After a few design rounds and feedback from clients we ended up with an api that works as follows:

A single api endpoint that is used to bulk ingest all securities from all custodians in the BridgeFT platform.

At a minimum, each security record contains the symbol, description, security type and custodian values.

Additionally, for each security received, we also provide additional 3rd party market data values (supplied by Intrinio) containing their symbol, description and security type, and Open Figi identifier.

With this information, the consumer can match records by symbol and select the custodian level description and/or security type or use the market data values for normalization.

It’s important to remember that this api can only provide details for the securities we receive from the custodians.

Why Can’t I Just Use the Securities Endpoint?

The securities endpoint only provides security information for the account positions that you have authorization to receive. The securities reference api provides all securities across all custodians that BridgeFT receives. Since we are not providing any account level information in this api we can share a wider range of information. Given its purpose, the securities endpoint simply cannot provide that range.