XigniteGlobalMaster is a quiet but very powerful API. This API is designed to help you accomplish one of the greatest challenges in market data management: Maintain your own accurate security master.

The most amazing feature of XigniteGlobalMaster is that it is a point-in-time security master.This means that you can request the data as of any point in time (going back to 2010 for US securities). So even if securities have been delisted, or changed symbols, you can still access this information. Few providers offer this feature and XigniteGlobalMaster is the only master data REST API to do so. 

You can first use XigniteGlobalMaster as an on-demand security master. If you need to look up any security at any time, you can use endpoints like GetMasterByIdentifier or GetSecurity to do so.

XigniteGlobalMaster offers massive coverage. It delivers security master data for a wide range of exchange-traded instruments including equities, ETFs, ADRs, money market funds, U.S. mutual funds and other structured products. With a broad coverage spanning more than 200 global markets, this API provides issuer, instrument and security level information for more than 1.5 million active instruments. You want to know all the details about active securities on a venue? Just call GetMasterByExchange. You could also use this API to start populating your own database for instance.

But how do you keep that database in sync? Downloading everything everyday would not only be inefficient, but it would not give you insight on what has changed and how it affects your own master database. This is where the second purpose of XigniteGlobalMaster kicks in, with GetMasterByExchangeChanges.The endpoint will give you all the changes that took place between two dates for a given exchange so that you can sync up your own master. 

We recently made a change to XigniteGlobalMaster to make it even easier for you to sync up your master. We added Identifier and IdentifierType to many instrument and security level results to enable better record keeping. Prior to this change, our API would return the most recent Identifiers for a record on the API result sets. We would also support older identifiers following a corporate action change such as reverse split or a symbol change. This would create some cases in which the input identifier was different from the output identifier due to a corporate action change, making it difficult to map and process result sets as you could not spot requested records within the output. Although a small change, adding Identifier and IdentifierType helps users maintain their security master for effectively and efficiently.