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Banking glossary

What is an FDIC certificate number?

Published September 20, 2026.

FDIC certificate number: The FDIC certificate number is the identifier the FDIC assigns an institution when it insures it.

Where it comes from

Issued at insurance, unique to the institution, and it stays with the charter through name changes. It is the key that joins FDIC data, such as branch level deposit market share, to a bank.

How to read it

The cert number is the identifier most FDIC tools ask for, and it is not the same thing as the RSSD id the Federal Reserve uses or the legal entity identifier a bank may also carry. A bank has several identifiers and they do not convert into one another.

The common mistake. Assuming the certificate survives a merger. When two banks combine, the acquired charter’s certificate is retired, so a historical series keyed on cert number simply ends rather than continuing under the acquirer.

Go deeper

See also. RSSD ID, Call report, Uninsured deposits.

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Knowing the definition is the easy half.

The hard half is whether a given bank’s number is good for the peer group it is actually measured in. That is what the scorecard does, for every bank that files a call report, updated with every FFIEC release.

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