Avox and CUSIP Global Services Partner to Bring Standard Entity ‘CABRE’ Identifiers to Global Financial Services Market

Avox and CUSIP Global Services (CGS), managed by Standard & Poor’s on behalf of the American Bankers Association, today announced their alliance to create a universal identification system for global business entities. The new standard code, to be known as a “CABRE” (CUSIP Avox Business Reference Entity identifier), will be generated and maintained for issuers, obligors and counterparties on a global basis.

The CABRE has been designed as a 10-character code that will be made available immediately to existing Avox and S&P/CUSIP customers as an adjunct to existing services. The structure will also be made available to global market participants in a variety of distribution options, including portfolio, bulk-file and web-based applications. A directory containing CABRE’s and basic data for over 250,000 entities from around the world and across all industry classes will be made available in Q2, 2009.

“With so much emphasis on global counterparty risk, and the need for certainty in identifying issuers, counterparties and obligors, we feel CUSIP Global Services is uniquely positioned to assist the industry in this endeavor” says Scott Preiss, VP for CUSIP Global Services in New York.  “Given their client-driven system of maintaining global entity data, Avox is an ideal partner to augment our time-tested system of unique issuer and obligor identification.”

Ken Price, Chief Executive Officer of Avox stated, “We felt supporting S&P’s plans to develop a global business entity identification system was a great opportunity to help drive convergence onto a common data standard. With this partnership, we will significantly grow the community of user firms that provide intelligence about changes to business entities taking place every day in the market. This crowd sourcing approach, combined with our expert data verification will significantly improve the quality and consistency of business entity data for Avox and S&P customers.”

Both CUSIP Global Services and Avox have been vocal in the past about the need for a common global identification standard for entities, and have fully supported the efforts of standards bodies to provide such a common language. Michael Atkin, Managing Director of the Enterprise Data Management Council, says “This collaboration by two leading financial information companies is an important step in getting a global standard entity identifier in place across the industry. It should help their respective clients solve immediate business entity identification challenges and pave the way for easier integration as the drive for an industry standard identifier matures. We strongly support the collaborative model for improving the quality of core reference data and applaud this initiative by Avox and S&P.”

About CUSIP Global Services
For 40 years CUSIP Global Services has provided a unique common language for identifying financial instruments across institutions, exchanges and nations, enabling financial services firms to benefit from improved operating efficiencies and substantially reduced administrative costs. The CUSIP® database contains issuer/issue identifiers, standardized descriptions and related data for more than 8.4 million financial instruments. Coverage includes: corporate, government, municipal and international securities, IPO’s, preferred stock, funds, CDs and competitive/negotiated deals. In total, the database contains over 50 different data elements including event-driven corporate actions. CSB is managed on behalf of the American Bankers Association by Standard & Poor’s. For more information, visit www.cusip.com.

About Avox Limited
Avox Limited utilises an entirely new approach to validating, correcting and enriching business entity data. The firm has established a shared pool of business entity data regularly contributed by a growing number of clients including SWIFT, Allianz, Citi, Barclays, Nomura and Standard Bank of South Africa. This industry data is combined with up-to-date content from other authoritative sources including regulators, business registries and company filings. Changes made by any of Avox’s clients to a data record are immediately revalidated by an Avox analyst and, if proven correct, they are broadcast, complete with a full audit trail, to all other clients holding the same record. The data in Avox includes corporate hierarchies, address information, industry sector codes, company identifiers, regulatory content and links to issued securities. Avox has offices in London, New York, Paris, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore, Tokyo and Wrexham (Wales). Avox is a majority-owned subsidiary of the Deutsche Börse Group, one of the world’s largest financial exchange organisations. For more information, please visit www.avox.info.

About The American Bankers Association
The American Bankers Association brings together banks of all sizes and charters into one association. ABA works to enhance the competitiveness of the nation's banking industry and strengthen America's economy and communities. Its members – the majority of which are banks with less than $125 million in assets – represent over 95 percent of the industry's $13.3 trillion in assets and employ over 2 million men and women. For more information, please visit www.aba.com.