Micro-data as a necessary infrastructure - standardisation of reference data on instruments and entities as a starting point: need for a Reference Data Utility

The Centralised Securities Database holds micro-data (so far reference data, prices, income data, amounts outstanding) on around seven million instruments. It was conceived as an infrastructure serving the production of macro-economic statistics, and has now been in use as such for the past four years. Staff of the ECB and the 27 NCBs of the ESCB have online access to the CSDB, mainly for data quality management.