In munis, the issuer name often isn’t the credit. The legal issuer on the bond, the party generating the cash flows, and the credit an analyst underwrites can be different entities. That mismatch creates a constant reconciliation burden - linking an issuer string on a trade blotter to the right borrower, the right disclosures on EMMA, and the right financial statements for the pledged credit. When those links aren’t stable, risk, surveillance, and execution get noisier than they need to be.
Munis don’t have a single definition of “entity”
Compared with corporate credit, muni roles are easier to conflate:
- Legal issuer: often a city/county/state agency or an authority.
- Obligor / borrower (economic payer): commonly a hospital system, university, charter network, or senior living operator.
- Pledge / revenue system: water/sewer, airport, tolls, leases, special taxes.
- Credit support: bond insurance, bank facilities, intercepts, moral obligation structures.
Add in non-unique names and constant drift (rebrandings, consolidations, reorganizations), and simple name matching breaks quickly. Without stable IDs and alias history, the same credit fragments into multiple “entities,” or different entities get merged incorrectly.
Conduit borrowers - where it hurts most
Conduit issuance is central to munis: an authority issues bonds and loans proceeds to a third party (often a 501(c)(3) borrower). Many market systems index to the authority because that’s the name on the security and the trade ticket, while the analyst needs the borrower and, very often, the obligated group under a master trust indenture. In day-to-day work, that mismatch makes exposure analysis surprisingly fragile: portfolios can look diversified across issuers even when the real risk is concentrated in a single borrower that has financed through multiple authorities, across multiple series, over many years. The practical outcome is time spent stitching together what should be obvious: “Which bonds actually belong to this credit?”
It also distorts surveillance and core credit metrics in ways that are easy to miss. Obligated groups evolve through acquisitions, divestitures, and restructurings, so trend analysis can become apples-to-oranges unless you track the perimeter over time - and preserve history when names change or members come and go. On top of that, finding the right financial statements and event notices on EMMA can be surprisingly brittle: disclosures may be posted under the conduit issuer, the obligated person, a dissemination agent, or a slightly different borrower name, which increases the odds of missing something material. Even when the math is correct, DSCR, leverage, and liquidity can be materially wrong if you pull consolidated statements for a pledged subset, include cash held at a foundation or affiliate, or overlook parity obligations sitting in a different series. For traders, the same gap shows up as slower discovery: it’s harder to quickly confirm whether two CUSIPs are the “same credit,” whether they share the same pledge, and where they sit in the borrower’s capital structure.
Government issuers - reporting vs legal boundaries
Even when the issuer is the operating government, the hard part is that accounting boundaries and legal obligations don’t line up cleanly. ACFRs are designed to present a reporting entity under GASB rules, which can include component units that are legally separate organizations (sometimes blended, sometimes discretely presented). It’s easy to look at an ACFR column and assume “the City stands behind this,” when the bondholder’s claim is actually limited to a specific pledge - or sits entirely outside the primary government’s legal promise.
The same confusion shows up inside a single name. “City of X” can mean GO debt backed by the general tax base, enterprise revenue debt tied to a water/sewer or airport system, or lease/appropriation structures issued through a building authority or public facilities corporation. These are different credits with different security and risk drivers, but they often get collapsed into one bucket in holdings, screens, and disclosures. When that happens, the resulting leverage, liquidity, and concentration signals can be significantly off.
What Terrapin is doing
Terrapin has built an entity master designed for the reality of the municipal debt market: linking bonds to issuers, obligors, obligated groups, revenue systems, and key relationships - with aliases and historical continuity. The data is designed to help analysts and traders roll up exposure correctly, route disclosures to the right credit, and spend less time reconciling names.