What is FIBO (Financial Industry Business Ontology)?

Financial institutions are drowning in data integration challenges. The same concept - a “counterparty”, an “interest rate swap”, a “beneficial owner” - is defined differently in every system, every jurisdiction, and every regulatory framework.

FIBO provides a single, authoritative definition for these concepts, expressed in OWL so that machines can reason about them. When a bank adopts FIBO, it can map data from trading, risk, compliance, and operations systems to a common model, eliminating ambiguity and enabling automated cross-system analytics.

Regulators increasingly expect consistent data definitions. FIBO aligns with requirements from BCBS 239, MiFID II, Dodd-Frank, and LEI standards - making it not just a technical convenience but a compliance accelerator.

FIBO is organised into domains, each covering a major area of financial services:

FND (Foundations): Core concepts like parties, agents, agreements, and dates that underpin all other domains.

BE (Business Entities): Legal entities, corporate structures, ownership, and control relationships.

FBC (Financial Business and Commerce): Financial intermediaries, regulators, and market infrastructure.

SEC (Securities): Equities, debt instruments, funds, and derivatives.

IND (Indices and Indicators): Market indices, interest rates, and economic indicators.

FIBO is expressed in OWL 2 DL, which means it supports automated reasoning - a reasoner can classify entities, check consistency, and infer relationships. FIBO also provides SHACL shapes for data validation and SKOS vocabularies for human-readable labels.

Regulatory reporting: A global bank maps its internal data models to FIBO, enabling automated generation of regulatory reports (CCAR, MiFID II, LEI) from a single knowledge graph instead of bespoke ETL for each regulator.

KYC and AML: A financial institution uses FIBO’s entity and ownership ontology to model beneficial ownership chains, automatically flagging complex structures that require enhanced due diligence.

Data governance: A bank’s CDO office adopts FIBO as the enterprise business glossary backbone, linking business terms to technical data assets and creating a single source of truth for data definitions across the organisation.