FIBO — The Financial Industry Business Ontology

Finance's shared standard library

FIBO (the Financial Industry Business Ontology) is maintained by the EDM Council and standardised through the OMG. It is open (MIT-licensed) and written in OWL 2 — a genuine, reasoner-friendly ontology, not just a vocabulary. Think of it as the standard library of financial concepts: legal entities, contracts, securities, loans, derivatives, and the relationships between them.

• Modular by domain — FIBO is organised into domains you import selectively: FND (Foundations — the upper layer), BE (Business Entities — companies, ownership, control), FBC (Financial Business & Commerce), SEC (Securities), DER (Derivatives), LOAN, and more. You pull only the modules you need.
• Reasoner-aware profiles — FIBO is published with consistency in mind; subsets are usable under tractable OWL profiles so classification stays feasible at enterprise scale.
• What it's used for — regulatory reporting, LEI (Legal Entity Identifier) data, counterparty and concentration risk, KYC/AML, and building a common language across a bank's fragmented systems.
• Production pattern — almost nobody uses raw FIBO end-to-end. The idiomatic pattern is a thin domain layer that subClassOfs the FIBO classes you need and adds your firm-specific attributes (the Atlas-Bank pattern from Ontology Engineering).

Use Case Example: A bank must report, per regulation, the ownership chain of each corporate counterparty. Rather than invent 'OwnershipLink', it reuses FIBO's modelled control/ownership relations and legal-entity classes, attaches LEIs as identifiers, and lets a reasoner roll up indirect ownership — the regulator receives data already in shared FIBO semantics.

FIBO is the standard library of finance. You wouldn't write your own date or crypto library for a banking app — you import a vetted, maintained one and add only your business logic on top. FIBO is that import for meaning: LegalEntity, Security, LoanContract come pre-modelled and industry-agreed, so your team writes the thin layer that's actually unique to your firm.

FIBO's modular structure

A Foundations upper layer (FND) underpins domain modules you import selectively; your firm adds a thin layer on top.

FIBO and GS1 field guide: finance vs commerce

FIBO and GS1 are both open-ish standards in the broad commercial world, but they solve different problems:

A bank asks, 'who ultimately controls this counterparty?' That is FIBO. A retailer asks, 'which exact product and lot moved through which depot?' That is GS1. Both are standards, but one models legal/financial meaning; the other anchors physical product identity and movement.