The Cusip lawsuit: A love story

For those hoping for a swift resolution to the ongoing lawsuit centered on the Cusip numbering system, life is full of disappointments.

After federal judge Katherine Polk Failla published her opinion and order that the case be allowed to proceed based on antitrust concerns, the three defendant firms—S&P Global, FactSet (and its acquired subsidiary, Cusip Global Services), and the American Bankers Association—each defended their positions in three separate filings through the Southern District of New York. Spoiler: They all denied any wrongdoing.

According to the case management plan, settlement discussions have not taken place, and additional parties wishing to join the class action have until the end of March 2024 to do so. In the meantime, all the parties—which includes the plaintiffs, Dinosaur Financial Group, Hildene Capital Management, and Swiss Life Investment Management—will conduct discovery in preparation for trial. The discovery process will conclude in March 2025, and the case is to be tried by a jury.

It could very well be three more years before this saga, which began in March 2022, draws to a close.

I’ve been following the suit since the day it was filed, and you may remember from one of my earlier columns that the news was leaked to me by someone who wasn’t an existing contact of mine. “Lawsuit imminent,” the subject line from the stranger read. Somehow, I didn’t know them, but they knew me. And they knew that I had been writing about Cusip, its underdog competitor known as the Figi, and S&P’s divestment from Cusip, which was ordered by the European Commission.

As I’ve gone deeper into the weird world of reference data and identifiers and their oh-so-many acronyms, I’ve noticed a single thing that sets it apart from the rest of the weird and niche topics you’ll find in the webpages of WatersTechnology, and it’s astonishingly simple—people really care about it.

And they don’t care about it in the way that some bros care about crypto, the metaverse (is that still a thing?), whatever Elon Musk is doing, or even ChatGPT. (Sorry, but I don’t need to talk to a glorified chatbot; I have friends and dinner parties). Which is to say, they don’t care about it in a self-serving way, a clickbait-y way, a manufactured fear-mongering way, or any other kind of way that annoys me personally and greatly.

They do care about it in a way that’s concerned with fairness, has notes of utility, inklings of public good, and is underscored by humility. After all, the money in licensing fees that firms pay to Cusip, in a lot of cases, is a rounding error on their balance sheets. It would be easier, less confusing, and promise far more payoff for these firms to focus on whatever the flavor of the day is in technology and data and keep it trucking.

Take Tim Baker, whose LinkedIn posts about the suit have rivaled and buoyed my own coverage. As the founder and head of his own consultancy, Blue Sky Thinking, and the financial services practice lead at Expero, he doesn’t exactly have a horse in this race. But he’s watched every single filing hit the docket. And as a proponent of the Financial Data Transparency Act, passed into law in December 2022, he’s eager to see how new rules will affect the traditional business of Cusip and of data licensing more broadly.

Another source of mine recently left a tier-1 bank for the fintech world. But after a long tenure in reference data at said bank, we’ve found ourselves on the phone for several cumulative hours, speculating wildly about what it all means and what may happen—even though they also don’t have a horse in this race anymore.

And the stranger who initially set my sights on the lawsuit? Doesn’t even work in finance. Or tech. Or law.

How does this incredibly mundane, archaic, old time-y, tiny corner of the financial sector garner such attention and controversy? I think it’s a testament to the humanity of it all in an industry where I often find new buzzwords and innovations trite and offensive. Reference data, identifiers, whatever you want to call it, seems to say, “There’s nothing to see here … but you really should have a look around.”

As for me, I’ll be watching, but from a new vantage point: across the pond in London. UK readers should come and find me beginning in October, as I take on the role of Emea editor and shepherd our three newest reporters: Emma Hilary Gould, Theo Normanton, and Eliot Raman Jones. For the first time in probably a long time, we’ll have an entirely new staff in the region, and I’m very excited about it, and them. It’ll be fun—maybe even as much fun as those reference data folks have.