Sources
Every figure on this site comes from somewhere, and a figure whose origin you cannot check is not reference data. This page names each source, the terms it may be reused under, how often we re-read it, and — the part most data sites leave out — what it does not cover.
| Source | What it feeds | Re-read | API |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEC EDGAR — bank filingsPublic domain (US government work) | Total assets for the 10 covered banks that file with the SEC, read from the balance sheet in the filing itself (us-gaap:Assets for US GAAP filers, ifrs-full:Assets for IFRS filers on Form 20-F), with the balance-sheet date and a link to the document | Re-read each quarter as 10-Q, 10-K, 20-F and 6-K filings land | /api/v1/banks/{id} |
| European Central Bank — euro reference ratesFree reuse with attribution | The conversion into dollars for banks that report in euro, yen or another currency — taken on the balance-sheet date itself rather than today, so a past balance sheet is not restated at a rate that never applied to it | Read once per balance-sheet date, not continuously | /api/v1/banks/{id} |
| Regulators' own public frameworksPublic documents; our summaries CC BY 4.0, the frameworks belong to their authorities | 16 supervisory authorities with their mandates, scope and the frameworks they administer, and the 16 jurisdictions those frameworks apply in | Checked per data release | /api/v1/regulators |
| Standards stewardsWe document and link; we do not republish licensed specification text | 15 standards with their steward, status and what they actually specify — ISO, EMVCo, PCI SSC, the OpenID Foundation, the Berlin Group, Open Banking Limited and FDX among them | Checked per data release | /api/v1/standards |
| Payment-system operator documentationOperators' own published material; our compilation CC BY 4.0 | 16 payment networks — card schemes, RTGS systems, instant rails, clearing houses and messaging networks — with their operator, settlement model, currency and region, taken from each operator's own documentation | Checked per data release | /api/v1/payment-networks |
| Banking Foundation compilationCC BY 4.0 — attribution: Banking Foundation (https://banking.foundation) | Everything that is ours rather than sourced: which entities are covered, the 16-layer infrastructure model, the 22 providers mapped onto those layers, the relationships between banks, regulators, jurisdictions and rails, and the schema itself | Versioned releases (currently seed-0.1 · 2026-08-28) | /api/v1 |
What each source does not cover
Stated plainly, because the gaps matter more than the coverage when you are deciding whether to rely on something.
SEC EDGAR — bank filings
Only SEC filers. 5 covered banks — ICBC, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, Rabobank and DBS — do not file, and their figures are our own approximations, marked as such on the page and never presented as reported. Balance-sheet dates differ between banks because reporting calendars differ; every figure carries its own date.
European Central Bank — euro reference rates
A single daily reference rate, not an intraday or transaction rate. Banks apply their own closing rates in their reporting, so a converted figure will differ slightly from the bank's own dollar disclosure where one exists.
Regulators' own public frameworks
These are descriptions of public frameworks, not legal advice, and not the current legal text. Rules change without changing our dataset version — read the regulator's own publication before relying on any of it.
Standards stewards
Several of these specifications are licensed or membership-gated. We describe scope and status and link to the steward; the normative text stays with its owner and is never mirrored here.
Payment-system operator documentation
Operating rules and scheme fees are commercial documents and are not reproduced. Settlement descriptions are the published model, not a guarantee of behaviour in any particular flow.
Banking Foundation compilation
Layer mappings and peer groupings are our classification, not a fact stated by any of the entities involved. They are a useful lens, not a standard, and we keep them separate from the fields we read out of documents.
Licensing, scoped
Our own work — the entity coverage, the infrastructure-layer model, the relationships, the schema and the writing — is CC BY 4.0, free to use with attribution.
What we read out of other people's documents is not ours to relicense. A bank's reported total assets is a fact from that bank's filing; a standard belongs to its steward; a regulator's framework belongs to that regulator. We describe, cite and link. We do not mirror licensed specification text, and we publish no bulk vendor dataset.
The API says so in every response rather than claiming one blanket licence over everything: see /api/v1/sources.
Something here wrong, stale or missing a source? admin@digitaldomains.market.