About ACT-ID.io
ACT-ID.io is a project to create and promote standard activity identifiers for sustainable finance — making financed activities easier to identify, compare, and reference across the bond market.
The project
ACT-ID.io was created to address a simple but persistent problem in sustainable finance: the same financed activity gets described in many different ways by different market participants, making comparison, mapping, and data quality unnecessarily difficult.
The project builds a registry of standard identifiers — Act IDs — that can be
used freely in disclosures, frameworks, SPO opinions, and public reporting. The
atomic, bindable unit is the use-of-proceeds (identifier family
ACT-U-): the specific, financeable thing a bond's capital pays for.
Supporting layers cover economic-activity classification (ACT-A-,
ISIC/NACE-aligned), criteria, thresholds, objectives, mappings, hierarchies,
variants, and institutions — see the
methodology for the full nine-entity model.
The goal is broad market adoption — not to replace existing language or frameworks, but to add a shared reference layer that makes every participant's work easier to connect with every other participant's work.
Design principles
ACT-ID.io is designed to be:
- Open for public use. Act IDs can be freely referenced in any non-commercial context.
- Market-facing first. The system is designed for adoption by practitioners, not academics.
- Methodologically sound. Use-of-proceeds, criteria, mappings, and provenance are tracked as independent, citable objects — decoupled rather than bundled together.
- Low-friction to adopt. You add an Act ID alongside your existing description — you do not replace it.
- Financially sustainable. A simple vendor licence supports the ongoing maintenance and growth of the registry.
Who is behind it?
ACT-ID.io is created and maintained by Ian Howard, a sustainable-finance practitioner focused on the infrastructure that makes labelled-bond markets comparable across jurisdictions. Ian works across taxonomy analysis, climate-aligned bond standards, and market data. He is available for speaking, advisory, and taxonomy-mapping engagements — use the contact form below.
The name “ACT-ID”
The name “ACT-ID” is a play on words — combining “act” (to take action) with “Activity ID.” Every labelled bond finances specific economic activities, and ACT-ID gives each one a standard identifier.
Get in touch
Whether you have a question about the registry, want to discuss a vendor licence, or want to contribute to the project — we'd like to hear from you.
Or scroll up to the contact form anytime.