Attributes — structural data about institutions

“Attributes” data is the non-financial metadata about a regulated entity: its legal name, charter type, physical address, regulator, parent organization, and lifecycle events (established, merged, closed). It is the join key that glues time-series data (Call Report, UBPR) to the real-world institution.

The RSSD

Every entity the Federal Reserve tracks — every bank, branch, subsidiary, holding company, non-bank affiliate — is assigned an RSSD ID: an integer up to 10 digits.

The RSSD carries no semantic information. Digit positions don’t encode anything.
Each RSSD is unique. Once assigned, it is never reused.
RSSDs are permanent across mergers: the surviving entity keeps its RSSD; the non-survivor’s RSSD becomes inactive but is preserved in historical extracts.

This is why the RSSD is the de facto primary key across Fed data products. An RSSD that appears in a Call Report for 2005 and is inactive in 2025 is not missing — it was merged or closed, and the event is recorded in the attributes history.

Lifecycle events

Event	Effect on RSSD
Chartered	New RSSD assigned.
Merged	Survivor’s RSSD continues. Non-survivor’s RSSD is marked inactive.
Acquired	Target usually retains its RSSD under new ownership; the parent link changes.
Charter conversion	RSSD is preserved; charter-type attribute changes.
Closed	RSSD marked inactive; last-known attributes frozen.

Other regulators’ identifiers

The Fed’s RSSD is the broadest scheme, but every other agency has its own:

FDIC

Certificate number (CERT): identifies insured depository institutions. All FDIC financial data products use CERT as the primary key.
Branch UNINUM: unique integer for each physical branch. Used in FDIC Summary of Deposits.

The Fed’s attribute extract crosswalks RSSD ↔ CERT. It does not crosswalk branch UNINUM ↔ any Fed identifier — that gap is a well-known pain point when joining Summary of Deposits to Fed branch data.

OCC

OCC ID (charter number): national banks and federal savings associations. Crosswalked to RSSD in the Fed attribute extract.

State regulators

State-chartered institutions typically have state-issued identifiers as well; these are reported in attribute data where available but there is no centralized crosswalk.

The ATTRIBUTES table and daily extracts

The Federal Reserve maintains an internal transaction table — the ATTRIBUTES record — where each row is an initial or changed structural characteristic: charter type, termination date, physical location, parent relationship, etc.

The Fed publishes daily extracts from this table at www.ffiec.gov/npw/FinancialReport/FinancialDataDownload. What you get:

Active attributes — current structural attributes of going concerns.
Closed attributes — last-known attributes of institutions no longer operating.
Branches — branch-level attributes (no UNINUM crosswalk; see above).
Transformations — daily log of structural events.
Relationships — parent/subsidiary links between entities.

Each extract is a ZIP of pipe-delimited text files with a versioned schema. The schema occasionally changes; track your column list against the header row.

The public/private gap

The full ATTRIBUTES transaction history (every change ever recorded for every entity) is not published. The public daily extract is a snapshot of the latest attributes per entity, not the transaction log. Reconstructing historical attribute progression from only the public extracts is possible but lossy — you see events where daily snapshots differ, but not intra-day changes or event types.

The full transaction record is available only via FOIA. For most research this is acceptable; for forensic work (e.g., reconstructing the precise state of an entity at an intermediate moment in a merger) it is not.

Typical fields in an attribute record

The extract schema is broad; these are the fields most code joins on:

Field	Description
`ID_RSSD`	Primary key (string, numeric).
`NM_LGL`	Legal name.
`CITY`, `STATE_ABBR_NM`, `ZIP_CD`	Physical address.
`ENTITY_TYPE`	e.g. `NAT` national bank, `SMB` state member bank, `SLHC` savings and loan holding company.
`PRIM_FED_REG`	Primary federal regulator: `FRS`, `FDIC`, `OCC`.
`ID_FDIC_CERT`	FDIC certificate number (where applicable).
`ID_OCC`	OCC charter number (where applicable).
`DT_OPEN`, `DT_END`	Opened / terminated dates.
`ID_RSSD_HD_OFF`	RSSD of the top-tier holder (empty if entity is itself a top holder).

Using attributes with the REST API

The ffiec-data-connect library’s REST API primarily serves filing data. To get the structural attributes of the filers themselves, use:

collect_filers_on_reporting_period(creds, reporting_period=..., series="call") — returns the panel of reporters for a quarter, each row including RSSD, FDIC cert, OCC charter, name, city, state, address, and filing type.

For the full daily attribute extract, download directly from the NIC URL above — the REST API does not serve it.