Financial data looks abundant but is structurally closed. Prices, fundamentals, filings, and reference data are dominated by a handful of vendors — Bloomberg, LSEG (Refinitiv), S&P Global, FactSet, Morningstar — whose terminals and feeds are licensed per seat or per use. The result is a paradox: the numbers that describe public markets are mostly not public in any machine-usable way.
The genuinely open layer is thinner than it appears. Regulatory filings (EDGAR in the US, similar registries elsewhere) are open. LEI — the global legal-entity identifier — is open by mandate. OpenFIGI provides open instrument identifiers. Central banks and statistical agencies publish macro series (FRED being the gold standard of usable open data). Crypto is the outlier: its market data, on-chain activity and reference data are radically open compared to traditional finance.
The gap is in the middle: clean, linked, entity-level data. Anyone can download a filing; almost no one can cheaply answer 'show me all listed subsidiaries of this group, with their tickers, exchanges and reporting currencies.' Entity resolution — knowing that Apple Inc., AAPL, US0378331005 and LEI HWUPKR0MPOU8FGXBT394 are the same thing — is where open data still loses to the terminals.
This is the layer Finance Foundation is built around: not another price feed, but the connective tissue — entities, identifiers, relationships and definitions — published in a form that people, applications and AI agents can consume directly.