A CUSIP (/ˈkjuːsɪp/) is a nine-character numeric or alphanumeric code that uniquely identifies a North American financial security for the purposes of facilitating clearing and settlement of trades.
The origins of the CUSIP system go back to 1964, when the financial markets were dealing with what was known as the securities settlement paper crunch on Wall Street.
[5][6][7] At that time, increased trading volumes of equity securities, which were settled by the exchange of paper stock certificates, caused a backlog in clearing and settlement activities.
Over the ensuing years, a growing number of market authorities and regulators came to recognize the value of the CUSIP system and embrace its usage.
It now covers multiple asset classes including government, municipal, and international securities (through the CUSIP International Numbering System, or CINS); initial public offerings (IPOs); preferred stock; funds, certificates of deposit; syndicated loans; and US and Canadian listed options.
The CGS database contains issuer and issue-level identifiers, plus standardized descriptive data, for more than 62 million financial instruments and entities.
The European Commission described the behavior as unfair pricing, noting that in cases such as clearing or regulatory compliance, there are no acceptable alternatives.
The European Commission claimed 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.
Issuer codes are assigned alphabetically from a series that includes deliberately built-in gaps for future expansion.
Working with the MBSCC, CUSIP Global Services (CGS) developed a specialized identification scheme for TBA (To Be Announced) mortgage-backed securities.