Market Metadata: ANNA and the uneven infrastructures of financial assetization

• In Event: Markets as data - III - Standards and Market Infrastructures

Abstract

Before assets can be traded on global, digitized marketplaces they have to be defined. As Birch and Munisea (2020) argue, assets are not given, they are constructed through socio-technical processes. Financial assets are social-technically constructed though the production of metadata standards. In information management systems, metadata schema are high levels of abstraction that formally represent entities and possible relationships in specific domains (Pomerantz 2015). Standards such as ISIN (ISO 6166), CFI (ISO 10962), MIC (ISO 10383), FISN (ISO 18774) and LEI (ISO 17442) describe the numbering algorithms used to generate codes that classify and uniquely identify securities in order to facilitate international transactions. The Association of National Numbering Agencies (ANNA) is the organization responsible for codifying, implementing, and maintaining the metadata standards that represent financial asset classes such as bonds, stocks, derivatives and other securities. Comprised of member banks, securities exchanges, clearing houses, and other financial institutions, ANNA’s role is manage the assignment of unique International Securities Identification Numbers (ISINs) to globally tradable securities. To ensure that all countries are integrated to digitized financial infrastructures, all countries either operate their own national numbering agency or work with a one of four numbering agencies headquartered in the Global North. This analysis of ANNA members (n=254), traces the infrastructural power of metadata schema in globalized finance with quantitive and qualitative methods. Despite performances of globalness, ANNA remains regionally controlled by European and American institutions.

Author

• Ulysses Pascal, Department of Information Studies, UCLA